Piero della Francesca painted like a geometer because he was one
Today Piero della Francesca is celebrated for calm, luminous frescoes. In his own time he was also a serious mathematician who wrote treatises on perspective and on the five regular solids, and copied out Archimedes by hand. His geometry later reached a wider public through a book illustrated by Leonardo da Vinci.
He was born around 1415 in Borgo Santo Sepolcro, in modern Tuscany. His father, a tradesman, died before he was born, and he took his name from his mother, known as la Francesca after marrying into the Franceschi family. She supported his schooling in both mathematics and art; the mathematics was probably meant for a career in trade. He likely trained with a local painter, Antonio di Giovanni d'Anghiari, and in 1439 was paid alongside Domenico Veneziano for frescoes in Florence, since lost. There he would have seen the work of Masaccio, whose majestic figures became a key inspiration.
Much of his career was spent on the move. He was elected to his hometown council in 1442, worked in Ferrara, and in 1451 painted Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta in Rimini. In 1452 he was called to Arezzo to take over the frescoes in the basilica of San Francesco, finishing in 1464. That cycle, The History of the True Cross, based on medieval legends gathered in the Golden Legend, is counted among the masterpieces of Renaissance painting. In Urbino, working for Duke Federico da Montefeltro, he produced the enigmatic Flagellation and the profile double portrait of Federico and Battista Sforza now in the Uffizi. Dating his undocumented pictures is tricky because his style barely changed.
Three of his treatises survive: an abacus treatise, a work on the five regular solids and one on perspective in painting. They cover arithmetic, algebra and original work in solid geometry. In the late 1450s he also copied and illustrated seven works of Archimedes in an 82-leaf manuscript. Much of his thinking was absorbed by the mathematician Luca Pacioli, whose Divina proportione translated his solid geometry. His eyesight began failing by 1480, yet he kept writing, finishing the book on regular solids in 1485.
He died in Sansepolcro on 12 October 1492. His ordered, almost magical light later inspired Giorgio de Chirico and Balthus, and Bohuslav Martinů wrote an orchestral piece on his frescoes, premiered at the 1956 Salzburg Festival.
Source: Piero della Francesca
