‘Colour, narrative, light’: London’s National Gallery to host largest ever exhibition devoted to Renaissance master Piero della Francesca
The show will focus be organised around seven interlocking building blocks of the Italian artist’s work
The National Gallery in London will open the largest ever exhibition of works by the influential Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca next autumn (2 October 2027-30 January 2028).
The show will include around 25 pictures and manuscripts including The Urbino Diptych-Portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (around 1472), travelling from the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence; the entire Pala di Perugia (Perugia Altarpiece, 1468), from the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia; and the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (around 1460-70), from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Three works drawn from the gallery collection will be exhibition centrepieces: Baptism of Christ (probably about 1437-45), Saint Michael (1469), and The Nativity (early 1480s). A digital version of The Legend of the True Cross in the Bacci Chapel of the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo will also feature.
“By delineating the pillars of Piero’s art, a distillation of what makes a Piero a Piero, the exhibition will comprise seven interlocking building blocks of his art: colour, design, space, perspective, narrative, and light,” says a gallery statement.
Last year Piero della Francesca’s The Baptism of Christ (1437-45) was selected by three artists as a favourite work in the collection for the publication The National Gallery: Paintings, People, Portraits (Taschen).
The late artist David Hockney called it a “truly a magnificent picture”, while the sculptor Antony Gormley says its stillness suggests “another world free from pain and uncertainty”. The Venezuela-born, London-based artist Alvaro Barrington said : “There is a balance in The Baptism of Christ that allows one’s eyes and body to rest, to stay still, while at the same time one’s eyes move without struggle across the painting.”
Piero, who was also a mathematical theorist, was the first artist to write a treatise on perspective, De prospectiva pingendi (from a painting perspective, around 1474) which discussed, among other technical topics, creating an illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat surface. It also discusses techniques for painting faces.
The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg staged an exhibition of Piero della Francesca’s work in 2018, which was the largest to date at the time with just 11 works.
The National Gallery‘s exhibition is co-curated by Laura Llewellyn, the museum‘s curator of Italian paintings before 1500, and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls of the Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam. Exhibition sponsors include the Intesa Sanpaolo bank and the philanthropist John J. Studzinski.
