LONDON.- 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.

Piero della Francesca (2 October 2027 – 30 January 2028) will celebrate this rare polymath who changed the course of European art history through his luminosity and pioneering use of perspective, and who became a cult artist in the 20th century influencing many painters.

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), this artist has inspired the ‘Piero Trail’ with people flocking to see his work in his Tuscan homeland. His paintings there have held modern audiences spell-bound ever since authors such as Roger Fry, Roberto Longhi, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus, Kenneth Clark, John Pope-Hennessy, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin and Carlo Ginzburg wrote pages of enraptured prose on him.

This exhibition will create a Piero trail 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.

Among the loans are The Duke and Duchess of Urbino Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza (about 1473–5,Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence), the entire Sant’Antonio Polyptych (1467–8, Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia), the Senigallia Madonna (1474–5, Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino) and the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels (about 1460–70, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts, USA).

By reuniting panels of all the artist’s disassembled altarpieces in purpose-made settings or frames, visitors will have an exceptional opportunity to appreciate each of them in their full splendour since their dispersal, and to see them together for the first time in centuries.

Bringing together decades of art historical scholarship with recent developments in Piero studies, especially new insights into his methods, the exhibition will present Piero for the 21st-century viewer. 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.

Piero della Francesca will also 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.