Architecture
San Francesco is the second church built by the Franciscans in Arezzo, an earlier church being located outside the city walls and destroyed during the Occupation. The building work on San Francesco was begun around 1290. The decoration of its façade was never realised.
The interior presents as a large church of simple unadorned design with a wide single nave, flanked on the left side by some chapels and, on the right side, by some niches. The tall groin-vaulted chancel is of square plan. [1]
Beneath the church is a smaller Chiesa inferiore or "Lower Church" as at Assisi, with a nave and two aisles, now used as exhibition hall.
The frescoes of Legend of the True Cross
The painting of the chancel began with a commission by the Aretine family Bicci, who called the painter Bicci di Lorenzo to paint the large cross-vault. In 1452, at Bicci's death, only the four Evangelists had been painted in the vault, as well as the triumphal arch with the Last Judgement and two Doctors of the Church .
Piero della Francesca was called in to complete the work. According to a document, he did so in two stages, the works halted during 1458-1459, and completed in 1466. [2]
The frescoes occupy three levels on the side walls and the eastern wall, surrounding a large window. The theme of the fresco cycle is the Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine. Piero della Francesca did not follow a chronological order, preferring to concentrate himself in the creation of symmetrical correspondences between the various scenes.
The episodes depicted are the following:
On the walls of the chancel arch are frescoes which depict: an angel, Cupid, St. Louis, St. Peter, St. Augustine and St. Ambrose.
Arezzo is a city and comune in Italy and the capital of the province of the same name located in Tuscany. Arezzo is about 80 kilometres southeast of Florence at an elevation of 296 metres (971 ft) above sea level. In 2013 the population was about 99,000.
Piero della Francesca, originally named Piero di Benedetto, was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting is characterized by its serene humanism, its use of geometric forms and perspective. His most famous work is the cycle of frescoes The History of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
Luca Signorelli was an Italian Renaissance painter who was noted in particular for his ability as a draftsman and his use of foreshortening. His massive frescoes of the Last Judgment (1499–1503) in Orvieto Cathedral are considered his masterpiece.
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The History of the True Cross or The Legend of the True Cross is a sequence of frescoes painted by Piero della Francesca in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo. It is his largest work, and generally considered one of his finest, and an early Renaissance masterpiece.
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Summer's Lease is a novel by Sir John Mortimer, author of the Rumpole novels, which is set predominantly in Italy. It was first published in 1988 and made into a British television mini-series, first shown in 1989. The title "Summer's Lease" is a play on a line from William Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: And summer's lease hath all too short a date. The novel involves the leasing of a Tuscan villa for the summer holidays. It is divided into six parts: "Preparations", "Arrival", "First Week", "Second Week", "Third Week", and "The Return".
This article about the development of themes in Italian Renaissance painting is an extension to the article Italian Renaissance painting, for which it provides additional pictures with commentary. The works encompassed are from Giotto in the early 14th century to Michelangelo's Last Judgement of the 1530s.
San Francesco della Vigna is a Roman Catholic church in the Sestiere of Castello in Venice, northern Italy.
San Piero a Grado is a church in Pisa, Tuscany, Italy, in the eponymous frazione 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) west of the city center. The church is located where once was a now disappeared port of the Pisan Republic, where, according to the legend, St. Peter landed in Italy from Antiochia in 44 AD.
Lorenzo di Bicci was an Italian painter of the Florentine School considered to be one of the most important painters in Florence during the second half of the 14th century. He is believed to have learned his trade from his father, about whom little is known. Lorenzo’s style, as well as that of his contemporaries Jacopo di Cione and Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, was influenced by the artist Andrea di Cione. Lorenzo's paintings made use of bright colors and his compositions avoided complexity. The figures he painted tended to have round faces and were often expressionless. Another one of Lorenzo's distinctive characteristics was his precision of execution. He was known for exceptional talent in drawing, an ability that he put to use at the initial stages of his painting. Unlike many celebrated Florentine artists of this period, Lorenzo mostly received commissions from the country clergy and from the lower-middle class Florentine guilds. His successors, Bicci di Lorenzo and Neri di Bicci, continued to serve these groups.
Basilica of Santa Margherita is a Neo-gothic style, Roman Catholic church, located just outside the Tuscan town of Cortona, Italy, at the intersection of Via delle Santucce and Via Sant Margherita, on a hill just below the Fortezza Medicea, and dedicated to a native saint of town, Margaret of Cortona.
San Francesco is a late-Renaissance, Roman Catholic minor basilica church located on via Terranuova in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna, Italy.
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Giovanni di Piamonte was a 15th-century Italian painter. The date and place of his birth are not known, but his name indicates that he was born in Piamonte near the present-day town of Pontassieve in Tuscany. He trained in the circle of Piero della Francesca and was one of his assistants.
The church of San Francesco of Assisi is a Catholic religious building in Pavia, Lombardy, Italy.
