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Piero della Francesca: Five Hundred Years Young
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20532 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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11 / 1992 |
1,892 Words |
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Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
The exact year when the great Renaissance master Piero della Francesca was born varies according to which art history you read--somewhere between 1406 and 1420. But there is no contesting when he died: October 12, 1492, a date being remembered this year with rather more fanfare for the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' voyage of discovery than for the death of a superlative artist.
Not, of course, that the artist's native province of Tuscany has neglected his memory; it is enthusiastically celebrating his quincentenary with exhibitions, lectures, and restorations of his works in the various Tuscan cities where he painted during his long creative life. In Florence, Piero is being remembered by an ambitious exhibition, Light and Color Perspective in the Florentine Formation of Piero, which runs through January 10,1993, at the Palazzo Vecchio.
In America, the painter's quincentenary has been honored with the release of three new books, each bearing the same title, Piero della Francesca. In the spring, Yale University Press came out with a volume by Carlo Bertelli, former director of the Brera Museum in Milan and presently professor of medieval and Renaissance art at the University of Lausanne. Abbeville Press brought out a book by Ronald Lightbown, a British scholar who has written extensively on Renaissance art. And in October, Abrams added to its Masters of Art series a title by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, a professor of art history who has taught at Yale, the University of Maryland, and Princeton and has written a number of works on the art of the Italian Renaissance.
If you can offer yourself only one book in honor of Piero della Francesca's magnificent career, Bertelli's work should be your choice. The reproductions are breathtaking and a joy to behold, even if the Lightbown text is perhaps more accessible to readers.
The century into which Piero was born was singularly rich in persons of genius and lasting historic impact. Think of just a few who spring to mind: Joan of Arc, Machiavelli, Fra Filippo Lippi, Batticelli, Mantegna, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Gutenberg, Copernicus, Erasmus, Lorenzo de' Medici, Francois Villon, Donatello, Hieronymus Bosch, Paolo Uccello, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico.
Considering the fame of Piero throughout the centuries it comes as something of a shock that his renown today rests on fewer than thirty surviving works. Only four bear his signature. No drawings or sketches have come down to us. The
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