The Piero Della Francesca Trail, with The Best Picture. This item is unavailable.The Piero Della Francesca Trail, with The Best Picture

More personal and sophisticated than a standard guidebook, this essential guide to the Piero masterpieces provides a rare glimpse of the workings of the heart and mind of a world-famous art historian as he looks at and thinks about the paintings andfrescoes. One by one, he describes the stories they portray, their meticulous composition, and the crucial and surprising role of fate in the commission for the church of San Francesco. Originally published in 1993, the book quickly achieved a cult following; this new edition includes, for the first time, Aldous Huxley's "The Best Picture," the famous essay that first inspired Pope-Hennessy to seek out the luminous and enigmatic works that now constitute the pilgrimage known as The Piero della Francesca Trail. The thousands of tourists who travel to Tuscany each year to follow the trail will welcome the republication of this beautifully designed volume.

Sir John Pope-Hennessy, one of the greatest art historians of the twentieth century and perhaps its greatest authority on Italian Renaissance art, was born in 1913. He served as Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Director of the British Museum and Consultative Chairman of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as well as Professor of Fine Arts at New York University. His many publications are now standard works of reference and include An Introduction to Italian Sculpture, Italian Gothic Sculpture, Italian Renaissance Sculpture, Italian High Renaissance and Baroque Sculpture, Cellini, many monographs and his masterwork, Donatello. Sir John died in 1995.