This is the essential guide to the Piero masterpieces. For the first time, the book is illustrated by color reproductions of the paintings, and introduced by Huxley’s provocative “The Best Picture,” the essay that inspired Sir John to embark, in 1938 at age 20, on his own pilgrimage to the famed artworks.

“This gemlike volume brings together Huxley’s essay and Pope-Hennessy’s trenchant 1991 visual analysis of individual pictures, exquisitely reproduced here.”—ArtNews

“An artist of a rather different age is remembered in a beautifully presented book, John Pope-Hennessy’s The Piero Della Francesca Trail…this reprint of the 1991 title includes Aldous Huxley’s essay, ‘The Best Picture’ and the combination as well as the quality of the illustrations will make this book a joy to own.”—Contemporary Review

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.

Aldous Huxley (1894-1963), the British author, traveled widely and lived in Italy during the 1920s. He lived in California starting in the 1930s and is best know for Point Counter Point, Brave New World, and After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.