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How did Piero della Francesca illustrate De prospectiva pingendi?
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Piero della Francesca
The Flagellation of Christ, tempera on wood panel by Piero della Francesca, late 1450s; in the National Gallery of the Marches, Urbino, Italy.
Piero della Francesca illustrated his treatise De prospectiva pingendi ("On Perspective in Painting"), written between 1474 and 1482, by hand-drawing and illuminating the manuscript himself.1
The primary manuscript, currently held in the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, features diagrams that he created to explain complex geometric, proportional, and perspectival problems. These illustrations were essential to his rigorous and logical approach, which followed the methods of the humanist architect Leon Battista Alberti and the ancient Greek geometer Euclid.1