Sansepolcro, a Renaissance town located in Tuscany on the Umbrian border, flourished culturally in the early 14th and 15th centuries.

The most famous son of Sansepolcro is the painter and mathematician, Piero della Francesca (1416-1492). One of his mathematical writings was a treatise entitled On Perspective for Painting, which was the first ever to deal with the mathematics of perspective, a technique for giving an appearance of the third dimension in two-dimensional works such as paintings or sculptured reliefs.

Four of Piero della Francesca's paintings are found in the city of his birth. The Resurrection, described by Huxley as the "greatest painting in the world," stands where it was originally painted in the 1400s for the council chamber of the town hall (now the museum).

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