PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA
(b. 1416, Borgo San Sepolcro, d. 1492, Borgo San Sepolcro)

Ideal City

c. 1470
Panel, 60 x 200 cm
Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

Piero gradually stopped painting almost twenty years before his death. Certainly one of the reasons would have been his ill health and his growing blindness; but it is also probable that he wanted to examine further the theories behind those laws of perspective and proportions that, with the addition of his original and inventive talent, had contributed to the creation of a modern art so different from his, Piero della Francesca responded with his treatises "De Prospectiva pingendi" and "De Corporibus regularibus", in which he analysed the theoretical and scientific foundations of his pictorial culture. It is from his drawings in De Prospectiva that the perspective construction of the panel so-called Ideal City, is born. This painting is so closely connected to Piero's theoretical writings that it must have been painted by a very close collaborator of his.




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