The exhibition will go on display from the 2nd October 2027 until the 30th January 2028.
© National Gallery, London
It has been announced that The National Gallery will stage the first ever fully monographic exhibition of the Italian Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca (about 1407/11–1492) next autumn.
This new show will celebrate Francesca’s uminosity and pioneering use of perspective, who became a favourite of Paul Cezanne (1839–1906), David Hockney (1937–2026), Paula Rego (1935– 2022) and the writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–75).
For this exhibition, there will bee a Piero trail created for today’s visitors at the National Gallery. Following him from his first works in his native Borgo San Sepolcro in Tuscany, to his time at the courts of Ferrara, Rimini, Rome and Urbino, and in the cities of Florence and Arezzo, the exhibition ends with Piero’s final homecoming to Borgo San Sepolcro where he built and decorated his own palazzo and wrote treatises on perspective and geometry.
With approximately 25 pictures and manuscripts, Piero della Francesca will take as its starting point the Gallery’s three paintings by the artist dating from three phases of his career – The Baptism of Christ (probably about 1437–45), Saint Michael (completed 1469), and The Nativity (early 1480s) – presenting them in the context of the full arc of his achievements.
In addition, the show will use digital resources to represent mural paintings that cannot be moved or travel; a digital installation in the exhibition, for example, will conjure the mastery and narrative brilliance of Piero’s cycle of The Legend of the True Cross (1452-66) in the Bacci Chapel of the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo.
The exhibition is co-curated by Laura Llewellyn, Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500 at the National Gallery, London; and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls of the Rijksmuseum and the University of Amsterdam. A fully illustrated catalogue with contributions by Laura Llewellyn, Machtelt Brüggen Israëls and other leading Piero scholars will be published to accompany the exhibition.
To find out more visit: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/piero-della-francesca