Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, was a Polish-French modern artist. He is known for his erotically charged images of pubescent girls, but also for the refined, dreamlike quality of his imagery.
Balthus by Damian Pettigrew (1996)
Nude with arms raised, oil on canvas, 1951 by Balthus
Balthus, Guitar Lesson, 1934, oil on canvas
In the 1960s and 70s he lived at, and restored, the Villa de Medici while director of the French Academy in Rome
Piero della Francesca was an Italian painter of the early Renaissance. To contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting is characterized by its serene humanism, its use of geometric forms and perspective. His most famous work is the cycle of frescoes The History of the True Cross in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
Piero della Francesca
The Resurrection (c. 1463–65)
Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta kneeling before St. Sigismund (1451)
Detail from The History of the True Cross: the Queen of Sheba meeting with King Solomon