Francesco di Giorgio
Encyclopedia
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
painter of the Sienese School
Sienese School
The Sienese School of painting flourished in Siena, Italy between the 13th and 15th centuries and for a time rivaled Florence, though it was more conservative, being inclined towards the decorative beauty and elegant grace of late Gothic art...
and a sculptor, as well as being, in Nikolaus Pevsner
Nikolaus Pevsner
Sir Nikolaus Bernhard Leon Pevsner, CBE, FBA was a German-born British scholar of history of art and, especially, of history of architecture...
's terms, "one of the most interesting later Quattrocento architects'" and a visionary architectural theorist; as a military engineer he executed architectural designs and sculptural projects and built almost seventy fortifications for the Federico da Montefeltro, Count (later Duke) of Urbino, for whom he was working in the 1460s, building city walls as at Iesi and early examples of star-shaped fortifications
Star fort
A star fort, or trace italienne, is a fortification in the style that evolved during the age of gunpowder, when cannon came to dominate the battlefield, and was first seen in the mid-15th century in Italy....
.
Born in Siena
Siena
Siena is a city in Tuscany, Italy. It is the capital of the province of Siena.The historic centre of Siena has been declared by UNESCO a World Heritage Site. It is one of the nation's most visited tourist attractions, with over 163,000 international arrivals in 2008...
, he apprenticed as a painter with Vecchietta
Vecchietta
Francesco di Giorgio e di Lorenzo , known as Vecchietta or Lorenzo di Pietro, was an Italian Sienese School painter, sculptor, goldsmith and architect of the Renaissance...
. In panels painted for cassoni
Cassone
Among furniture in Italy, a cassone or marriage chest is a rich and showy type of chest, which may be inlaid or carved, prepared with gesso ground then painted and gilded. The cassone was one of the trophy furnishings of rich merchants and aristocrats in Italian culture, from the Late Middle Ages...
he departed from the traditional representations of joyful wedding processions in frieze-like formulas to express visions of ideal, symmetrical, vast and all but empty urban spaces rendered in perspective
Perspective (graphical)
Perspective in the graphic arts, such as drawing, is an approximate representation, on a flat surface , of an image as it is seen by the eye...
.
Leone Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer and general Renaissance humanist polymath...
's and Filarete
Filarete
Antonio di Pietro Averlino , also "Averulino", known as Filarete was an Italian Renaissance architect, sculptor and architectural theorist from Florence. He is perhaps best remembered for his design of the ideal city of Sforzinda, the first ideal city plan of the Renaissance.-Biography:Antonio di...
's; he worked on it for decades and finished sometime after 1482; it circulated in manuscript. Its projects were well in advance of completed projects at the time, but innovations, for example in staircase planning, running in flights and landings round an open center, or dividing at a landing to return symmetrically on each wall, became part of architectural vocabulary in the following century. The third book is preoccupied with the "ideal" city, constrained within star-shaped polygonal geometries reminiscent of the star fort
Star fort
A star fort, or trace italienne, is a fortification in the style that evolved during the age of gunpowder, when cannon came to dominate the battlefield, and was first seen in the mid-15th century in Italy....
, whose wedge-shaped bastion
Bastion
A bastion, or a bulwark, is a structure projecting outward from the main enclosure of a fortification, situated in both corners of a straight wall , facilitating active defence against assaulting troops...
s are said to have been his innovation.
Francesco di Giorgio finished his career as architect in charge of the works at the Duomo di Siena
Duomo di Siena
The Cathedral of Siena , dedicated from its earliest days as a Roman Catholic Marian church and now to Santa Maria Assunta , is a medieval church in Siena, central Italy....
, where his bronze angels are on the high altar and some marble floor mosaics are attributed to his designs.
Further reading
- Bertrand Gille, 1978. Les Ingénieurs de la Renaissance, Thèse Histoire, Paris, 1960. Seuil, in series Points Sciences) ISBN 2-02-004913-9