The paintings of Piero della Francesca have remained intriguing because of their distinctive three-dimensional space and unemotional figures, but the artist himself remains a mystery. Curiously, his activities were not confined to painting. He wrote treatises on perspective, commercial arithmetic, and geometry, all without ever settling in any of the centers of great intellectual achievement. James R.Banker has unearthed previously undiscovered documents that make it possible for him to write a social biography of the artist that accounts for his early formation. The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca examines the culture of the southeastern Tuscan town of Piero's youth. Analyses of San Sepolcro's political and social organization and its specific religious culture serve to enhance our understanding of Piero's early career prior to his experiences in Florence.
Piero della Francesca has remained an enigma because of the contradictions observed in his life and art. Banker's archival research has enabled him to clear away some of the obscurities. This book situates Piero in the earliest social and intellectual worlds within which he moved. Heretofore, writers on Piero have begun his putative formation in Florence in 1439. Banker demonstrates that the young painter's formation began prior to 1439, when he was surrounded by his family and the local artisans' community.
The Culture of San Sepolcro during the Youth of Piero della Francesca integrates social and art history in order to better understand the formation of a Renaissance artist. It will be vital to scholars and historians of the Italian Renaissance city states, as well as to art historians and those interested in the relationship of art and society.
James R. Banker is Professor of History, North Carolina State University.

James Banker and Carol Lansing have shaped a collection of the works of Marvin B. Becker, a respected scholar in Florentine and Renaissance history. Becker began his work in 1953 when he arrived in Florence as a Fulbright Scholar, only eight years after the end of World War II. Italy was still struggling with the turbulent wake of the war's end. In those chaotic circumstances, Becker commenced his study of the tumultuous past of Florentine society, producing a rich amount of scholarly work to enhance the field.
In the capital of humanism, he initiated what was to be a lifelong examination of the Western civil tradition. In Florence he could study the interplay of ideas and action in what he was to call the "public world." The rise of this world out of the private, feudal and corporate structures of the medieval commune, its functioning and its eventual subversion by the authoritarian structures of the early modern state were, he thought, valuable information for modern political cultures. In the 1950s and 1960s, Becker produced approximately twenty papers dealing with a wide variety of themes and issues raised by the work of other scholars such as Davidson, Salvemini, Ottokar, Panella, Rodolico, Barbadoro, Baron, and others. He also introduced his own formulations on a range of subjects including the political role of Florence's minor guilds, usury, taxation, public debt, popular heresy, church-state relations, the city's chroniclers, the influence of "new men" upon Florentine government and changing mentalities.
These papers, in their originality, their richness of documentation and their suggestiveness, are still relevant for current scholarship. The editors of this volume have chosen the papers for the convenience of readers who may know Becker only through his books, or from the myriad of footnotes of other scholars who have drawn so much from his work. This volume will be of interest to scholars, students, and others interested in Renaissance history, whether it be social or political.
Marvin B. Becker is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, University of Michigan. James Banker is Professor of History, North Carolina State University. Carol Lansing is Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.