Piero della Francesca

Piero della Francesca (c. 1415–1492) was born Piero di Benedetto in Borgo Santo Sepolcro, now Sansepolcro, in Tuscany, and was most probably apprenticed to the local painter Antonio d'Anghiari. In 1439 he was working in Florence with Domenico Veneziano, and Masaccio's frescoes there became an important source for him. He went on to work in Ferrara, Rimini, Rome, Arezzo and Urbino, but kept returning to his home town, where he sat on the city council and where he died. His painting is marked by serene humanism, geometric form and perspective, and he was a serious mathematician, writing treatises on perspective in painting and on the five regular solids. His most famous work is the fresco cycle of the History of the True Cross in San Francesco at Arezzo, finished in 1464. At Urbino, where he worked for Federico da Montefeltro, he painted the double portrait of the duke and Battista Sforza, and The Flagellation, one of the most famous and contested pictures of the early Renaissance. Here: The Flagellation of Christ.