Piero della Francesca

Early Renaissance master Piero della Francesca's world-famous portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino, Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, his atmospheric background landscapes, and his fresco cycle, The Legend of the True Cross, painted for the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, have cemented his fame as one of the greatest artists of the fifteenth century. But Piero was not only an innovative painter and master technician, he was also recognized in his own time as being a talented mathematician who wrote treatises inspired by the ideas of Leon Battista it is much to his credit that the system of perspective in Western painting became codified. The apparent humanism of Piero's world, the influence of his Florentine contemporaries Masaccio, Donatello, Filippo Lippi, and not least of all his mentor, Domenico Veneziano, impelled the master's brush to create some of the most meditative images in Western art.