But though time and whitewash have combined to narrow this branch of our inquiry, we must not overlook an artist who ranks high among the reformers of painting, and upon whom the patronage of Duke Federigo was specially lavished. His family name has not come down to us, but he is generally known by the matronymic of Piero della Francesca, from the Christian name of his mother, though sometimes designed Pietro del Borgo, or Il Borghese, from Borgo S. Sepolcro, his native town. His life has unfortunately been left in much obscurity by his only biographer Vasari, who might have well bestowed somewhat more pains upon the career of one born in a neighbouring town, who left his finest works at Arezzo, and whose merits he is more inclined to magnify than to slight. The loose assertions of this author have been adopted by most succeeding writers, without addition and with little investigation; but of the school in which Pietro acquired the rudiments of his art, and of the earlier period of his career, we remain still uninformed, though his age and Apennine origin favour the conjecture that he may have imbibed his first lessons from works of Ottaviano Nelli the contemporary Umbrian master.[*142] Beyond question two very different manners appear in the productions of his pencil; the first, crudely composed and laboriously frittered into detail, with much of the contracted ideas and bright tinting of the old miniaturists; the second, broad and masterly in conception, and executed with a flowing pencil, though retaining an elaborate finish. Both styles are united in a little picture at Urbino, which we shall presently describe, the Flagellation being in the earlier, the three portraits in the larger manner. If born, as Vasari incorrectly states, in the last years of the fourteenth century,[*143] Piero, instead of being patronised by Guidobaldo I., must have reached at least eighty-four in that Duke's time; indeed, he would have been past middle life ere Federigo, whom, as we shall presently see, he calls his chief patron, succeeded to that state in 1443. "Guidobaldo Feltro" may, however, probably be a mistake of Vasari for Count Guidantonio, in which case a solution would be afforded for several of his manifold contradictions; and at that court, if not in earlier life, our artist might have been the associate or pupil of Nelli. Passing over works now lost which del Borgo is stated on the same authority to have executed at Pesaro, Ferrara, Ancona, and Loreto, we find him called by Nicholas V. to Rome, where his frescoes appear to have been destroyed in the many alterations made on the Vatican Palace before that century closed. [Footnote *142: Piero della Francesca was the pupil of Domenico Veneziano.] [Footnote *143: Piero was born in 1416.]