Piero Della Francesca

Rating:
Summary: A lavish treatment of a fascinating painter
Review: Piero's ouevre has never seen such handsome representation in book form. Razor-sharp, large-format illustrations, including details printed at full-bleed on forearm-wide pages, permit intimate inspection of works which even in person can sometimes only be viewed distantly in dim church-light.

Quibbles include some tenuous conjectures about the development of the artist's thinking (which, if the author is taken at face value, includes the Zohar). It's too bad that more progress hadn't been made on the newly-restored Arezzo frescoes at the time of publication. But these aside, this is as definitive and gorgeous of a presentation of Piero as one could fairly ask for. Simply a beautiful book.