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Fans of Dan Brown (and Tom Hanks) hoped to get an education in the Italian Renaissance along with their beach reading (and movie-going) of The Da Vinci Code. But they and those who think that Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Donatello are just Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are missing out on a Renaissance master of art and mathematics just as captivating and mysterious as Da Vinci—Piero della Francesca. In Piero della Francesca: Artist and Man, James R. Banker relies on newly discovered documents and years of study of the Renaissance to crack the “Piero Code.” You won’t run across the Knights Templar or unearth the Holy Grail in Banker’s biographical study, but you will come away with a real-life detective tale compellingly told and a greater understanding and appreciation of an artist whose art may look otherworldly but, as Banker suggests, grew directly from Piero’s hometown roots. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Forget Da Vinci, Try Solving the Piero della Francesca Code."

Poets quite often make the best art critics. The same aesthetic antennae attuned to language and meaning come into play when diving into the meaning of visual art. So, when Irish poet Seamus Heaney, 1995 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (among a slew of other prizes), talked to More Intelligent Life magazineabout his personal “seven wonders of the world,” it was interesting that he picked as his favorite work of art Piero della Francesca’s The Flagellation of Christ (shown above). Called by many the greatest poet alive today and the most important poet of the last half century, Heaney knows that his pronouncements carry a lot of weight. So, why is this the greatest living poet’s favorite painting? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why Is This the Greatest Living Poet’s FavoritePainting?"


[Many thanks to friend Dave, the second greatest living poet, for passing on this story to me.]

The duality is right there in her name: Francesca Woodman. Woodman, daughter of two successful artists and a promising photographer herself, cherished childhood memories of family trips to Tuscany and returned to Italy as a college student to study art. The exhibition Francesca Woodman, at the Guggenheim Museum, New York through June 13, 2012, gives the young artist, who committed suicide in 1981 at just 22 years of age, her biggest retrospective yet, with 120 photographs, artist books, and recently discovered short videos presenting the width and depth of her short but full life and career. At the same time, Isabella Pedicini’s Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Film examines just how “Italian” the Italian-American photographer truly was and how Woodman took the two cultures embedded in her name and created a single, transcendent art. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Francesca Woodman Turned Two Cultures into One Art."

[Image: Francesca Woodman. Untitled, Providence, Rhode Island, 1976. Gelatin silver print, 14 x 14.1 cm. Courtesy George and Betty Woodman. © 2012 George and Betty Woodman.]

[Many thanks to the Guggenheim Museum, New York, for providing me with the image above and essays from the catalog to the exhibition Francesca Woodman, which runs through June 13, 2012. Many thanks also to Contrasto Books for providing me with a review copy of Francesca Woodman: The Roman Years: Between Flesh and Film by Isabella Pedicini (translated from the Italian by Margaret Spiegelman).]

The Italian Renaissance remains one of those amazing hinges of human history where civilization made a great leap that continues to be felt today. For German art historian Hans Belting, this “quantum leap consistent in the way perspective introduced the gaze into the picture and thus, at the same time, the human subject doing the gazing.” Works such as Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (shown above), a masterful maze of mathematical perspective put into paint, pull the viewer in and create another world of twists and turns full of figures more human than art had offered ever before. Before this type of gazing, however, Belting argues that the artists of the Renaissance turned their gaze East—to the mathematical theories of perspective originating from Arab culture, specifically those of Alhazen, a Muslim polymath working at the turn of the first millennium to understand and improve upon the ancient mathematicians’ ideas. In Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, Belting makes a compelling case that the vision of the Renaissance—a vision that still holds us today—began not in Florence, but in Baghdad, with important implications for both cultures. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Did the Italian Renaissance Begin in Baghdad?"

[Image: Piero della Francesca. Flagellation of Christ, 1455-1460.]

[Many thanks to Harvard University Press for providing me with a review copy of Hans Belting’s Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider.]