Piero della Francesca (Sansepolcro about 1420 AC - 1492 AC), one of the most important artist of the Italian Renaissance, has left an important trace of his work in Arezzo.

The artist, after a period of oblivion which followed his death, is nowadays considered one of the greatest painters of the 15^th century. He unifies in his works the intuitions regarding the spatial prospective to the clever use of the light and of the colours, determining the definition of the three-dimensional environments and of the figures with their monumental plastic. The rigor in the search of the prospective is sustained by his theoretical researches on the figurative arts ("De prospectiva pingendi", in which he asserts that it is the prospective which is the real base of the painting) and mathematics ("Treaty of abacus", on the applied mathematics written around 1450 AC and the successive "Libellus de quinque corporibus regolaribus", on the regular and semi regular polyhedron, which doctrine he applies to the harmonious building of the human body, of the alphabetical letters and of the architectonic elements).
Heir of the teachings of the plastic works of Masaccio, of the capabilities to organize the urban spaces of Brunelleschi and Alberti, of the luminosity of the colours of Beato Angelico and Domenico Veneziano, he painted together with this last one the choirs of Sant'Egidio in Florence, nowadays not visible any longer. After his youth period of training in Florence, he moved to Ferrara where his works were lost and to Rimini, where he worked on the Malatestiano temple; he then moved to Arezzo and to the court of Urbino where he left some of his most relevant works preserved in the National Gallery of the Marche in Urbino, in the Offices of Florence and in the Art Gallery of Brera in Milan. His largest painting cycle that we can admire, the "Leggenda della Vera Croce" (Legend of the True Cross), is preserved in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo and has recently benefited from a long restoration work.