The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (371 page)

 
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picture plane
.

In the imaginary space of a picture, the plane occupied by the physical surface of the work.
Perspective
appears to recede from the picture plane, and objects painted in
trompe-l'œil
may appear to project from it.

 
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Picturesque
.

Term covering a set of attitudes towards landscape, both real and painted, that flourished in the late 18th and early 19th cents. It indicated an aesthetic approach that found pleasure in roughness and irregularity, and an attempt was made to establish it as a critical category between the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘
Sublime
’. Picturesque scenes were thus neither serene (like the beautiful) nor awe-inspiring (like the Sublime), but full of variety, curious details, and interesting textures—medieval ruins were quintessentially Picturesque. Natural scenery tended to be judged in terms of how closely it approximated to the paintings of favoured artists such as Gaspard
Dughet
, and in 1801 the
Supplement
to Samuel Johnson's
Dictionary
by George Mason defined ‘Picturesque’ as: ‘what pleases the eye; remarkable for singularity; striking the imagination with the force of painting; to be expressed in painting; affording a good subject for a landscape; proper to take a landscape from.’ The Picturesque Tour in search of suitable subjects was a feature of English landscape painting of the period, exemplified, for example, in the work of
Girtin
and (early in his career) of
Turner
, and the Picturesque generated a large literary output; much of it was pedantic and obsessive and it became a popular subject for satire.

 
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(
c.
1635–95).
English sculptor and mason, son of a painter (d. 1658) of the same name, some of whose decorative work survives at Wilton House, Wiltshire. Little is known of his youth, but by 1671 he was well established in London and was much employed by Sir Christopher Wren on the rebuilding of the City churches, both as a mason and as a stone-carver. He was also a wood-carver, and his work in this field is of such quality that it has sometimes been credited to Grinling
Gibbons
. His best work, however, is as a sculptor of portrait busts, the most notable being the splendid marble bust of Wren (Ashmolean, Oxford,
c.
1673), brilliantly characterized and more convincingly
Baroque
than anything else of the date in English art. It is generally considered the best piece of English sculpture of the 17th cent., but it has also been suggested that the workmanship does not live up to the boldness of the conception and that Pierce is here perhaps copying a lost bust by
Coysevox
. Pierce also worked as an architect, the Bishop's Palace, Lichfield (1686–7), being his chief known work. There are several drawings by him in the British Museum, London.

 
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(
c.
1410/20–1492).
Italian painter, virtually forgotten for centuries after his death, but regarded since his rediscovery in the early 20th cent. as one of the supreme artists of the
quattrocento
. He was born in Borgo San Sepolcro (now Sansepolcro) in Umbria and spent much of his life there. We hear of him also at various times in Ferrara, Rimini, Arezzo, Rome, and Urbino. But he found the origins of his style in Florence, and he probably lived there as a young man for some time during the 1430s, although he is documented there only once, in 1439 (the first known reference to him), when he was assisting
Domenico Veneziano
on frescos (now lost) in S. Egidio. His first documented work, the
polyptych
of the
Madonna della Misericordia
(Pinacoteca, Sansepolcro), commissioned in 1445 but not completed until much later, shows that he had studied and absorbed the artistic discoveries of his great Florentine predecessors and contemporaries—
Masaccio
,
Donatello
, Domenico Veneziano , Filippo
Lippi
,
Uccello
, and even
Masolino
, who anticipated something of Piero's use of broad masses of colour. Piero unified, completed, and refined upon the discoveries these artists had made in the previous 20 years and created a style in which monumental, meditative grandeur and almost mathematical lucidity are combined with limpid beauty of colour and light. His major work is a series of
frescos
on the
Legend of the True Cross
in the choir of S. Francesco at Arezzo (
c.
1452–
c.
1465). The subject was a medieval legend of great complexity, but Piero made from its fanciful details some of the most solemn and serene images in western art—even the two battle scenes have a feeling of grim deliberation rather than violent movement. He was a slow and thoughtful worker and often applied wet cloths to the plaster at night so that—contrary to normal fresco practice—he could work for more than one day on the same section.
Much of Piero's later career was spent working at the humanist court of Federico da
Montefeltro
at Urbino. There he painted the portraits of Federico and his wife (Uffizi, Florence,
c.
1465) and the celebrated
Flagellation
(still at Urbino, in the Ducal Palace). The
Flagellation
is his most enigmatic work, and it has called forth varied interpretations;
Gombrich
has suggested that the subject is rather
The Repentance of Judas
and
Pope-Hennessy
that it is
The Dream of St Jerome
. Piero is last mentioned as a painter in 1478 (in connection with a lost work) and his two final works are probably
The Madonna and Child with Federigo da Montefeltro
(Brera, Milan,
c.
1475) and the unfinished
Nativity
(NG, London). Thereafter he seems to have devoted himself to mathematics and
perspective
, writing treatises on both subjects.
Vasari
said Piero was blind when he died, and failing eyesight may have been his reason for giving up painting, but his will of 1487 declares him to be ‘sound in mind, in intellect and in body’ and is written in his own clear hand. After his death, Piero was remembered mainly as a mathematician rather than as a painter. Even Vasari, who as a native of Arezzo must have known the frescos in S. Francesco well, is lukewarm in his enthusiasm for his work. However, he had considerable influence, notably on
Signorelli
(in the weighty solemnity of his figures) and
Perugino
(in the spatial clarity of his compositions). Both are said to have been Piero's pupils.