Piero di Cosimo
Paintings
Adoration of the Child
Adoration of the Child , detail
Adoration of the Child , detail
The fall of Vulcan (Hephaestus)
Hunting scene
Hunting scene , detail
Returning from the Hunt
Returning from the Hunt , detail
Vulcan ( Hephaestus ) and Aeolus
Vulcan ( Hephaestus ) and Aeolus , detail
Vulcan ( Hephaestus ) and Aeolus , detail
Forest fires
The Death of Procris
The Death of Procris , detail
The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths
The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths , detail
The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths , detail
The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths , detail
History of Silenus : Bacchus discovers the honey
History of Silenus : misfortune of Silenus
History of Silenus : misfortune of Silenus , detail
History of Silenus : misfortune of Silenus , detail
Visitation
Visitation , detail
Visitation , detail
Visitation , detail
Reading Mary Magdalene
Madonna with St John the Baptist
Madonna with Saints
Madonna with reading Christ Child
Madonna and Angels
Mary, the child adoring , Tondo
Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine
Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine , detail
Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine , detail
Mystic Marriage of St. Catherine , detail
Myth of Prometheus
Myth of Prometheus
Perseus frees Andromeda
Perseus frees Andromeda , detail : Andromeda
Perseus frees Andromeda , detail : musicians
Perseus frees Andromeda , detail : Perseus
Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci
Portrait of Francesco Giamberti
Portrait of Francesco Giamberti , detail
Portrait of Francesco Giamberti , detail
Portrait of Giuliano da Sangallo
Pugliese - altar
Pugliese - altar , detail
Pugliese - altar , detail
Pugliese - altar , detail
Pigeons Madonna
Immaculate Conception
Immaculate Conception , detail
Immaculate Conception , detail
Immaculate Conception , detail
Immaculate Conception , detail
Venus, Mars and Cupid
Venus, Mars and Cupid , detail
Venus, Mars and Cupid , detail
Allegory
Crucifixion of Christ
Portrait of Giuliano da Sangallo
Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci
Saint Anthony
The Young Saint John the Baptist
Venus, Mars and Amor
Piero di Cosimo (January 2, 1462[1] – 1521[2]), also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian Renaissance painter.
Biography
The son of a goldsmith, Piero was born in Florence and apprenticed under the artist Cosimo Rosseli, from whom he derived his popular name and whom he assisted in the painting of the Sistine Chapel in 1481.
In the first phase of his career, Piero was influenced by the Netherlandish naturalism of Hugo van der Goes, whose Portinari Triptych (now at the Spedale of Santa Maria Novella in Florence) helped to lead the whole of Florentine painting into new channels. From him, most probably, Cosimo acquired the love of landscape and the intimate knowledge of the growth of flowers and of animal life. The manner of Hugo van der Goes is especially apparent in the Adoration of the Shepherds, at the Berlin Museum.
He journeyed to Rome in 1482 with his master, Rosselli. He proved himself a true child of the Renaissance by depicting subjects of Classical mythology in such pictures as the Venus, Mars, and Cupid, The Death of Procris, the Perseus and Andromeda series, at the Uffizi, and many others. Inspired to the Vitruvius' account of the evolution of man, Piero's mythical compositions show the bizarre presence of hybrid forms of men and animals, or the man learning to use fire and tools. The multitudes of nudes in these works shows the influence of Luca Signorelli on Piero's art.
During his lifetime, Cosimo acquired a reputation for eccentricity—a reputation enhanced and exaggerated by later commentators such as Giorgio Vasari, who included a biography of Piero di Cosimo in his Lives of the Artists[3]. Reportedly, he was frightened of thunderstorms, and so pyrophobic that he rarely cooked his food; he lived largely on hard-boiled eggs, which he prepared 50 at a time while boiling glue for his artworks[4]. He also resisted any cleaning of his studio, or trimming of the fruit trees of his orchard; he lived, wrote Vasari, "more like a beast than a man".
If, as Vasari asserts, he spent the last years of his life in gloomy retirement, the change was probably due to preacher Girolamo Savonarola, under whose influence he turned his attention once more to religious art. The death of his master Roselli may also have had an impact on Piero's morose elder years. The Immaculate Conception with Saints, at the Uffizi, and the Holy Family, at Dresden, best illustrate the religious fervour to which he was stimulated by Savonarola.
With the exception of the landscape background in Rosselli's fresco of the Sermon on the Mount, in the Sistine Chapel, there is no record of any fresco work from his brush. On the other hand, Piero enjoyed a great reputation as a portrait painter: the most famous of his work is in fact the portrait of a Florentine noblewoman, Simonetta Vespucci, mistress of Giuliano de' Medici. According to Vasari, Piero excelled in designing pageants and triumphal processions for the pleasure-loving youths of Florence, and gives a vivid description of one such procession at the end of the carnival of 1507, which illustrated the triumph of death. Piero di Cosimo exercised considerable influence upon his fellow pupils Albertinelli and Bartolomeo della Porta, and was the master of Andrea del Sarto.
Vasari gave Piero's date of death as 1521, and this date is still repeated by many sources, including the Encyclopædia Britannica.[5] However, contemporary documents reveal that he died of plague on April 12, 1522.[6]
Selected works
* Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci (c. 1480) Oil on panel, 57 x 42 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France
* The Visitation with Saints Nicholas and Anthony (1489–1490) Wood, 184 x 189, National Gallery of Art, Washington
* Venus, Mars, and Cupid (1490) Wood panel, 72 x 182 cm, Staatliche Museen, Berlin
* St. Mary Magdalene (1490s) Tempera on panel, 72,5 x 76 cm, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
* Mystical Marriage of St. Catherine of Alexandria (1493) Oil on panel, Ospedale degli Innocenti, Florence
* Jason and Queen Hypsipyle with the Women of Lemnos (ca 1499) Private Collection[7]
* Allegory (1500) Panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington
* St. John the Evangelest (1504–1506) oil on panel, Honolulu Academy of Arts
* The Discovery of Honey (c. 1505-1510) Oil on panel, Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts
* Vulcan and Aeolus (c. 1495-1500) Oil and tempera on canvas, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa
* The Finding of Vulcan on Lemnos (1495–1505) Oil and tempera on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
* Perseus Frees Andromeda c. 1515, Oil on wood, 70 x 123 cm, Uffizi, Florence
* Giuliano da San Gallo (c. 1500) Wood panel, 47,5 x 33,5 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
* The Death of Procris (c. 1500) Oil on panel, 65 x 183 cm, National Gallery, London
* Virgin with Child, St. John the Baptist and an Angel (c. 1500-1510) Oil on panel, diameter 129 cm, São Paulo Museum of Art, São Paulo
* The Adoration of the Christ Child (1505) Oil on wood, Galleria Borghese, Rome
* Immaculate Conception with Saints (c. 1505) Wood panel, 206 x 172 cm, Uffizi, Florence
* The Misfortunes of Silenus (c.1505-1510) Oil on panel, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts
* The Myth of Prometheus (1515) Oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich and Musée des Beaux-Arts, Strasbourg
* The Building of a Palace (1515–1520) oil on panel, 83 x 197 cm, Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida
* Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels (c.1520) oil on wood panel, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma
References
1. ^ After much uncertainty, Piero's birth date was identified in the parish reconds of San Lorenzo by Dennis Geronimus, "The Birth Date, Early Life, and Career of Piero di Cosimo", The Art Bulletin 82.1 (March 2000:164-170); Geronimus was able to rely on the consistency of Lorenzo di Piero d'Antonio's reports of his children's ages at the catasti of 1469 and 1480, and a new database of Florentine baptismal records.
2. ^ Godfrey, F.M. (1976). "Piero di Cosmio". in William D. Halsey. Collier's Encyclopedia. 19. New York: Macmillan Educational Corporation. p. 42.
3. ^ Fermor, Sharon (1997). Piero di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention, and Fantasia. Reaktion Books. pp. 7–9 and ff.
4. ^ According to Giorgio Vasari; see Hernándex de la Fuente, David (June 2009). "Un messaggio alchemico nell'allegoria della vita?". Storica (4): 80.
5. ^ "Piero Di Cosimo". Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 2006. http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9059972. Retrieved 2006-10-28.
6. ^ Waldman, Louis Alexander (March 2000). "Fact, Fiction, Hearsay: Notes on Vasari's Life of Piero di Cosimo". The Art Bulletin (The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 1) 82 (1): 171–9. doi:10.2307/3051370. http://www.jstor.org/pss/3051370.
7. ^ Dennis Geronimus, Piero Di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange, (Yale University Press), 2006 fig. 122
* This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (Eleventh ed.). Cambridge University Press.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/ ", Text is available under the
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License