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Piero di Cosimo, Florentine Painter of Classical Mythology

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By Anthony Miller , Anthony Miller

March 18, 2023
4:16 pm
Los Angeles, CA

Piero di Cosimo (2 January 1462 – 1521), also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian Renaissance painter. 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 Uffizi Gallery 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

Presumed self-portrait at the right side of his painting Perseus Freeing Andromeda. Liberazione di Andromeda. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Piero di Cosimo (2 January 1462 – 1521), also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian Renaissance painter.

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 Uffizi Gallery 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.

A Satyr mourning over a Nymph. Piero di Cosimo. Description: The Death of Procris. Medium: oil on poplar wood. Dimensions height: 65.4 cm (25.7 in); width: 184.2 cm (72.5 in). (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Allegory, probably c. 1500. Piero di Cosimo. Dimensions: overall: 56.2 x 44.1 cm (22 1/8 x 17 3/8 in.) framed: 74.3 x 62.2 x 7 cm (29 1/4 x 24 1/2 x 2 3/4 in.). (Photo: The National Gallery of Art/public domain)

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. 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, 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. However, contemporary documents reveal that he died of plague on 12 April 1522.

The Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci

Portrait de femme dit de Simonetta Vespucci. Piero di Cosimo. Date: 1490. Medium tempera on panel. Dimensions height: 570 mm (22.44 in); width: 420 mm (16.53 in). (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci is a painting from c. 1480, which portrays noted Genoese beauty Simonetta Vespucci as Cleopatra with an asp around her neck. It is housed in the Musée Condé of Chantilly, France.
Simonetta is partly nude, and her rhythmic profile is accentuated by the black cloud placed behind it. She wears a gold necklace, around which two snakes coil, possibly an allusion to her death from consumption.
Piero’s art reflects his bizarre, misanthropic personality. He belonged to no school of painting. Instead, he borrowed frommany artists, incorporating elements of their style into his own idiosyncratic manner.
‘Here, Piero di Cosimo has chosen a portrait type which was already outmoded by the time he came to paint it (c. 1520). The profile view may have been borrowed from a medal portrait used by Piero as a model, since Simonetta Vespucci, whose latinized name appears on the strip along the bottom of the painting, had died of consumption in 1476.

Original publication: Arts in Toscany