Quotes

Piero della Francesca was a thoughtful, considered man whose work we can understand a little better through the quotes attributed to him from his influential career.

Naturally, as with anyone of this period, there are very quotes still remaining today. Perhaps some remain in their original language and have yet to be translated into any English-based publications. The two that we are aware of are included below along with several online quotations from third parties about his life and legacy.

Famous Quotes by Piero della Francesca

Certainly many painters who do not use perspective have also been the object of praise; however, they were praised with faulty judgement by men with no knowledge of the value of this art.

Painting is nothing but a representation of surfaces and solids foreshortened or enlarged, and put on the plane of the picture in accordance with the fashion in which the real objects seen by the eye appear on this plane.

Quotes about Piero della Francesca by Art Historians and Famous Artists

Piero della Francesca ... whose serene, disciplined exploration of perspective had little influence on his contemporaries but came to be recognized in the 20th century as a major contribution to the Italian Renaissance. The fresco cycle The Legend of the True Cross (1452–66) and the diptych portrait of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, and his consort (1465) are among his best-known works.

Encyclopaedia Britannica

Piero della Francesca is one of the most admired 15th-century Italian painters. The cool colour palette and geometrical compositions contribute to the refined and meditative nature of his works... Piero was also a mathematical theorist. This interest is reflected in the clearly defined volume of the figures and accurate perspective in his works. It is balanced by a naturalism which derived from Netherlandish art. His patrons were among the most powerful men in Italy: the Duke of Urbino, Sigismund Malatesta in Rimini, and Pope Nicholas V in Rome. According to tradition, Piero taught Signorelli. Vasari says he became blind in old age. He was buried in Sansepolcro.

National Gallery, London, UK

His art was ample, monumental and rational, and represents one of the highest artistic ideals of the early Renaissance. The absolute mathematical rigour of his creations emphasises the abstract and iconic traits of his paintings and adds a powerful religious feeling to his masterpieces. To contemporaries, he was known as a mathematician and geometer as well as an artist, though now he is chiefly appreciated for his art. By 1439 Piero della Francesca was working with Domenico Veneziano on frescoes for the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. His experience and contacts in Florence, where he would have seen the works of such sculptors, artists, and architects as Donatello, Brunelleschi, Masaccio, and Fra Angelico, had a profound influence on Piero's style.

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