By Anne Leader
Piero della Francesca. Il disegno tra arte e scienza (Drawing between art and science) opens today at Palazzo Magnani, Reggio Emilia, where it will remain on view through 14 June 2015.
Curated by Filippo Camerota, IAS member Francesco Paolo DiTeodoro, and Luigi Grasselli, the exhibition includes one hundred works by Piero and his contemporaries that demonstrate the development and practice of perspectival drawing during the Renaissance. Featured artists included Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, Ercole de’Roberti, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Giovanni Bellini, Francesco di Giorgio, Albrecht Dürer, Antonio da Sangallo the Younger,Baldassarre Peruzzi, Amico Aspertini, and Michelangelo.
The exhibition explores Piero’s double role as designer and mathematician. For the first time since the Renaissance, Piero’s entire graphic and theoretical corpus will be displayed together, including seven copies – some in Latin, others in the vernacular – of his De Prospectiva Pingendi (from Bordeaux, London, Milan, Paris, Parma, and Reggio Emilia), the Abacus (Florence), the Libellus de quinque corporibus regularizes (Vatican City), and Archimedes
(Florence).
Piero della Francesca, St. Louis of Toulouse, 1460, detached fresco. Museo Civico di San Sepolcro, San Sepolcro, Arezzo
Piero Della Francesca, De prospectiva pingendi, 1472-92, manuscript. Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia
Ercole de’ Roberti, Miracles of St. Vincent Ferrer (detail), predella of the Pala Griffoni, 1473, tempera on panel. Musei Vaticani, Città del Vaticano
Giovanni Bellini, Head of a man looking up, with long hair and beard. Black chalk, pricked for transfer. British Museum, London