Piero della Francesca

In this week’s episode of Cocktails with a Curator, Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator Xavier F. Salomon explores Piero della Francesca’s St. John the Evangelist, one of the few major works by the Renaissance artist in the United States. This striking panel was originally part of a polyptych commissioned for the high altar of Sant’Agostino in Piero’s hometown of Borgo San Sepolcro. The polyptych was probably dismembered in the mid-16th century, less than one hundred years after it was made, and many fragments are now lost.

During a career spanning nearly sixty years, Piero della Francesca worked in almost every major center across the Italian peninsula, although nowhere did he accept more commissions than in Borgo San Sepolcro. Like his native city, Piero's paintings are possessed of a character that is neither Florentine nor Sienese but entirely unique. On the closing weekend of the special exhibition, the show's curator discusses Piero's career in Borgo and explores how some of his masterpieces created for that city reached American shores. This lecture is made possible by the Robert H.