Francesco di Giorgio

Francesco di Giorgio Martini (baptised September 23, 1439 – 1502) was an Italian painter of the Sienese School, a sculptor, an and theorist, and a military engineer who built almost seventy fortifications for the Duke of Urbino.

Born in Siena, he apprenticed as a painter with Vecchietta. In panels painted for "cassoni" he departed from the traditional representations of joyful wedding processions in frieze-like formulas to express visions of ideal, symmetrical, vast and all but empty urban spaces rendered in perspective. Francesco di Giorgio is also known for architectural designs and sculptural work for Federico III da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, for whom he built star-shaped fortifications.

He composed an architectural treatise "Trattato di architettura, ingegneria e arte militare" that he worked on for decades and finished sometime after 1482; it circulated in manuscript. [It was not printed until 1841, in Turin.] Its projects were well in advance of completed projects at the time. The third book is preoccupied with the "ideal" city, constrained within star-shaped polygonal geometries reminiscent of the star fort, whose wedge-shaped bastions are said [Siegfried Giedion, "Space, Time and Architecture", 4th ed. 1962:43, fig. 6.] to have been his innovation.

Francesco di Giorgio finished his career as architect in charge of the works at the Duomo di Siena, where his bronze angels are on the high altar.

Further reading

*Bertrand Gille, 1978. "Les Ingénieurs de la Renaissance", Thèse Histoire, Paris, 1960. Seuil, in series "Points Sciences") ISBN 2-02-004913-9

External links

* [http://www.wga.hu/bio/f/francesc/biograph.html Web Gallery of Art Biography on Francesco di Giorgio Martini]

Notes