“This gemlike volume brings together Huxley's essay and Pope-Hennessy's trenchant 1991 visual analysis of individual pictures, exquisitely reproduced here.”—ArtNews

This is the essential guide to the Piero della Francesca masterpieces. John Pope-Hennessy takes the paintings and frescoes one by one, describing the stories they portray, their meticulous composition, and the questions about them that remain unanswered. He explains the new ideas in the air in 1439 when the young Piero joined his first studio as well as the crucial and surprising role of fate in the commission for the church of San Francesco.

The book is illustrated with color reproductions of the paintings and introduced by Huxley's provocative “The Best Picture,” the essay that inspired Sir John to embark, in 1938 at age twenty, on his own pilgrimage to the famed artworks.

About the Authors

Sir John Pope-Hennessy, one of the greatest art historians of the twentieth century and perhaps its greatest authority on Italian Renaissance art, was born in 1913. He served as Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Director of the British Museum and Consultative Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. His many publications are now standard works of reference and include An Introduction to Italian Sculpture, Italian Gothic Sculpture, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture, Cellini, many monographs, and his masterwork, Donatello. Sir John died in 1995.

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963), the British author, traveled widely and lived in Italy during the 1920s. He lived in California starting in the 1930s and is best know for Point Counter Point, Brave New World, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.

Hardcover; 86 pages.