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Piero di Cosimo

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Piero di Cosimo
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(born 1462, Florence, Republic of Florence — died 1521, Florence) Italian painter. His name derives from that of his master, Cosimo Rosselli, whom he assisted on frescoes for the Sistine Chapel. His later mythological paintings exhibit a bizarre Romantic style. Many are filled with fantastic hybrid human-animal forms engaging in revels (The Discovery of Honey, c. 1500) or fights (Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapiths, c. 1500). His art reflects his eccentric personality. He belonged to no school of painting but borrowed from many artists, including Sandro Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.

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Art Encyclopedia: Piero di Cosimo
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(b ?Florence, 1461-2; d Florence ?1521). Italian painter and draughtsman.

Tax declarations made by Piero di Cosimo's father suggest that the artist was born in either 1461 or 1462. According to the first, he was eight years old in 1469, while a catasto (land registry declaration) of 1480 gives his age as 18. A document of 1457 establishes that his father, Lorenzo di Piero d'Antonio, was a maker of small tools (succhiellinaio) rather than a goldsmith, as Vasari claimed. By 1480 Piero appears no longer to have been living at the family house in the Via della Scala, Florence, but was an unsalaried apprentice or workshop assistant to Cosimo Rosselli, from whom he received room and board and eventually took the name of Piero di Cosimo.

See the Abbreviations for further details.


 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Piero di Cosimo
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Piero di Cosimo (pyĕ'rō dē kô'zēmō), 1462-1521, Florentine painter, whose name was Piero di Lorenzo. He adopted the name of his master, Cosimo Rosselli, whom he accompanied to Rome in 1482 and assisted in the decorating of the Sistine Chapel. His religious works have charm, but more important are his animated mythological scenes. Commissioned by the Florentine Francesco Pugliese, he painted many works depicting the life of primitive man. Among these pictures are the Hunting Scene and the Return from the Hunt (both: Metropolitan Mus.); Discovery of Honey (Worcester Mus.); Discovery of Wine (Fogg Mus., Cambridge); and Vulcan and Aeolus (National Art Gall. of Canada, Ottawa). Other well-known works by Piero are the Death of Procris (National Gall., London) and Simonetta Vespucci (Chantilly). The influence of Leonardo da Vinci is evident in some of his work, including the Portrait of a Woman with a Rabbit (Yale Univ.).

Bibliography

See biography by R. L. Douglas (1946); S. J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance (1961).

Dictionary: Piero di Co·si·mo   (dē kō'zē-mō) pronunciation, 1462-1521.
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Florentine painter. His works include Vulcan and Aeolus (c. 1486).


Wikipedia: Piero di Cosimo
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Not to be confused with Piero di Cosimo de' Medici.
Perseus Rescuing Andromeda, oil on canvas, 1513, Uffizi.

Piero di Cosimo (also known as Piero di Lorenzo; January 2, 1462[1] – 1521[2]) was an Italian Renaissance painter.

Contents

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 Encyclopedia Britannica.[5] However, contemporary documents reveal that he died of plague on April 12, 1522.[6]

Selected works

References

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  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 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

Gallery

St. John the Evangelist, oil on panel, 1504-6, Honolulu Academy of Arts, USA

Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci, oil on panel painting, c. 1480, 57 x 42 cm, Musée Condé, Chantilly, France

thumb|Saint Anthony with pig in background, c. 1480, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., USA

Venus, Mars and Cupid, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, Germany

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Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/.  Read more
Dictionary. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2007. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
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