A painting hidden in the corner of a tiny church in the parish of San Paolo in Arezzo could be the work of the great early Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca.
Art scholars have been working on this painting to determine the author for quite some time, but it was only recently that rumors made the news in the local press when the parish priest Don Natale Gabrielli just could no longer keep the information to himself: he says he’s known for a long time the painting depicting San Antonio Abate (Saint Anthony) is likely a masterpiece by Piero della Francesca.
Paola Refice, president of the Fondazione Piero della Francesca and director of the Medieval Museum in Arezzo, has studied the painting for many years. “Saint Anthony’s face can be attributed to Piero della Francesca and was surely made using one of the cartons employed for the Bacci chapel,” she said. (The Cappella Bacci is a chapel in the 14th-century Basilica di San Francesco in Arezzo, housing Piero della Francesca's fresco cycle of the “Legend of the True Cross”, painted between 1452 and 1466 and considered one of the greatest works of Italian art.) “Now we have to figure out if the rest of the body was also painted by Piero della Francesca. There are indeed elements that point in that direction," she continued.
Piero della Francesca was born in Borgo Sansepolcro, in Tuscany, in 1415. He pioneered the use of perspective in Renaissance art; his paintings were characterized by a serene humanism and geometric forms. He worked in various central Italian towns, including Rimini and Urbino. His most famous works of art are the fresco cycle “The Legend of the True Cross” (1452–66) and the diptych portrait of Federico da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, and his consort (1465).
