London's National Gallery Plans Its Largest Piero della Francesca Show
The National Gallery in London will open its largest ever exhibition of works by Piero della Francesca on 2 October 2027, The Art Newspaper reported.
Piero was a painter of the Italian Renaissance, the period of the 1400s and 1500s when artists across Italy were reinventing painting. The gallery calls him one of the most admired 15th-century Italian painters. Few of his works travel, so a show that gathers them in one place is rare.
The exhibition will bring together around 25 pictures and manuscripts. Some of the loans are large and famous. The Urbino Diptych, a pair of hinged panels from around 1472 showing Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza, is coming from the Gallerie degli Uffizi in Florence. The entire Perugia Altarpiece, painted in 1468, is coming from the Galleria Nazionale dell'Umbria in Perugia. An altarpiece is a painting made to stand behind the altar of a church.
A third loan comes from across the Atlantic. Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Angels, from around 1460 to 1470, will arrive from the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
The London gallery's own collection provides three centrepieces: Baptism of Christ, Saint Michael from 1469, and The Nativity from the early 1480s. The show will also feature a digital version of The Legend of the True Cross. That cycle of wall paintings sits in the Bacci Chapel of the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo, and it cannot be moved from its walls. Visitors will see it on screen instead.
The exhibition is organised around seven linked themes, which the gallery describes as building blocks of Piero's art. Two curators, Laura Llewellyn and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls, are working on it together. The gallery says it will include some of his most celebrated altarpieces.
The Art Newspaper reported that the show runs from 2 October 2027 to 30 January 2028. The National Gallery's website lists the closing date as 2 January 2028. The gallery also lists the exhibition as free to enter.
The show is being described as the largest of its kind, and it follows an earlier ambitious show. In 2018 the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, Russia, staged a Piero exhibition it called the largest ever at that time, with 11 works. That show included half of his movable works, meaning paintings on panel or canvas rather than frescoes painted into walls.
For London visitors, the appeal is simple. Pictures that would normally require a trip to Florence, Perugia or Arezzo will hang in one room, under one roof, for a few months. Anyone planning the trip should check the gallery's website for final opening times and dates before booking.
