SASSETTA [1392-1450]
Le Retable en morceaux: Polyptyque pour San Francesco à Borgo San Sepolcro (1437-1444) Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York A contract is drawn up before a notary. The painter is engaged to create a painting on wood of the same height and width as the one already placed over the high altar. He is engaged to deliver it within four years and to come to hang it himself. He will be paid 510 florins (the highest sum ever paid for a work during this period). Today, 26 fragments of the altarpiece are dispersed throughout 10 museums worldwide. There is little chance of its ever being rassembled, but here the puzzle will be pieced together before our eyes.
UCELLO [1397-1475]
"The Rout of San Romano", Paolo Uccello This film uses video techniques to explore and reveal how a great work from the past was composed. This trio of huge panels, now housed in three separate museums, is seen as a sort of manifesto for the new art movement of the 15th century. Painters were using the principles of perspective rediscovered in the Ancient Greek treatises, and the innovations of an architect like Brunelleschi or a goldsmith like Ghiberti, to convey space and depth. But in Uccello, in addition to a passionate interest in perspective, we find an intense curiosity about geometrical forms, colour and especially movement. The subject of "The Rout of San Romano" is an obscure encounter between Florentine and Sienese mercenaries in the Tuscan hills in 1432. Uccello turns it into a feast for the eyes and the intellect, treating it as an opportunity to invent contradictory images which have influenced later painters down to the Cubists and Surrealists.
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA [1420-1492]
Le Rêve de la diagonale: "La Flagellation" (vers 1460) Musée national des Marches (Urbino, Italie) It's the most mysterious painting in the history of art. Although approximatively 30 hypotheses have been formulated trying to explain its political meaning, the "Flagellation" painted perhaps between 1450 and 1460 by a very scholarly artist in full possession of his senses. It's truly a manifesto of a new art and Renaissance thought.
