The Embassy of Italy and the Italian Cultural Institute present a lecture about Piero della Francesca by Cecilia Frosinini, Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro in Florence.
Fundamental to a comprehensive understanding of Piero della Francesca’s art is the distinction between the meaning of “design” and “drawing” in his painting practice.
The two words are frequently used as synonymous and especially in Italian they are often summed up in the unique concept of disegno. Still, there are two different meanings behind the two different terms, that were perfectly known to the contemporaries of the artist.
Piero scholarship has often emphasized drawing as a mechanical reproduction, as can be testified by the extensive use of spolvero in his fresco paintings, that prove the availability of cartoons (that didn’t survive till our present time).
More recent researches carried out at the Opificio delle Pietre Dure have provided evidences for a more in depth planning phase in Piero della Francesca’s painting technique. He was fairly meticulous in studying in advance his compositions, at the extent of being obsessive in the use of cartoon, carefully planned and reused, not as a mean of time-saving in the economy of a workshop practice, but as a mean of controlling the space and the insertion of figures in it.
The lecture will show many examples of these results, spacing from frescoes to panel paintings, collected by the mean of advanced technical and scientific equipments and recollected in a broader art historical frame.
IMAGE CREDITS: Detail of The Resurrection, Piero della Francesca (c. 1460, Museo Civico, Sansepolcro)
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LOCATION
Embassy of Italy – Auditorium
3000 Whitehaven Street NW
Washington, DC 20008
MORE INFO
CECILIA FROSININI
Ms.Frosinini holds a degree and Ph.D. in Art History, University of Florence: doctoral dissertations about the painters’ Guild and workshop practice in Quattrocento Florence.
Since 1990 she is an Art Historian at the “Opificio delle Pietre Dure e Laboratori di Restauro” in Florence, as vice-director of Painting Conservation Department and director of Paper and Drawings Conservation Department and Mural painting Conservation Department. Over 70 scientific papers and publications on art historical subjects (monographical researches about the Bicci’s workshop, Donatello and Michelozzo’s partnership, Piero della Francesca’s Polittico degli Agostiniani and Polittico della Misericordia, Leonardo da Vinci’s technique).
She was an A. B. Mellon fellow at CASVA (Washington DC) in Spring 2012, and an E. J. Safra visiting professor at CASVA (Washington DC) in Spring 2013.
Her main interests are in archival researches, and technical proceedings.
She has undertaken a research on the underdrawing technique in Italian Medieval and Renaissance paintings, showing up as one of the few art-historians, with a traditional education, involved in the field of scientific investigations.
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