Piero della Francesca

Roberto Longhi (1890-1970) is regarded by Italians as their most important art critic, art historian, and prose stylist of this century, with unsurpassed powers of observation and description. This book is a new English version of the third edition (1963) of Longhi's seminal work on the Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, with an introduction by Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Keith Christiansen. In the New York Review of Books, Francis Haskell wrote, Roberto Longhi is "the most brilliant Italian art historian of our century and a stylist of intoxicating powers . . . few of his very idiosyncratic works have been translated into English; but thanks to the enterprise of the Sheep Meadow Press, this situation is at last being remedied."

"With the exception of Walter Pater, it is difficult to think of a critic whose work is so close to the art it embraces that it becomes itself a kind of art. Yet Pater's criticism is always on the verge of metamorphosing into poetry. With Longhi, the scholar and the poet are seamlessly fused, resulting in prose that is palpable and radiant as the Renaissance paintings he describes so meticulously: an object of rare beauty indeed."--John Ashbery