The documented facts of Piero della Francesca’s life are few, but the implicit contradictions in his life and art illuminate his social character. Despite his father’s social and financial ambitions, della Francesca became a painter-not the most eminent of careers in the Renaissance city of San Sepolcro. Although della Francesca spent most of his life outside the centers of great intellectual achievement, he experimented with representations of three-dimensional space and wrote numerous treatises on the geometry of perspective that would later attract nineteenth-century painters and twentieth-century scholars of modernism.

In The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca, James R. Banker digs deeply into previously undiscovered archival evidence to examine della Francesca’s yet unstudied earliest works and their connections to his putative formation in Florence. Banker’s historical investigation also moves beyond the biography of this influential Renaissance artist, integrating social and art history to provide a rich and informative cultural context for della Francesca’s development. Banker explores the influence of della Francesca’s family on his life and work, in order to understand the role of the family in the vibrant artisan culture of the Tuscan Renaissance. Banker’s analyses of the political and social organization of San Sepolcro, as well as its specific religious construction, further illuminate the intellectual background for della Francesca’s growth as a pioneering artist.

Modern intellectuals from Francis Bacon to Paul Cezanne and T. S. Elliot have considered Piero della Francesca’s work a forebear to the modern exploration of line and abstraction. Banker’s social biography of the artist will intrigue not only scholars of the Italian Renaissance and art historians but all scholars interested in the complex interplay between art and society.