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Piero di Cosimo
(1462-1521?)
Cosimo, Piero di (c.1462-1521?). Florentine painter, a pupil of
Cosimo Rosselli, whose Christian name he adopted as a patronym. There are
no signed, documented, or dated works by him, and reconstruction of his
oeuvre depends on the account given in Vasari's Lives. It
is one of Vasari's most entertaining biographies, for he portrays Piero
as a highly eccentric character who lived on hard-boiled eggs, which he
cooked while he was boiling his glue, to save the firing'. The paintings
for which he is best known are appropriately idiosyncratic fanciful mythological
inventions, inhabited by fauns, centaurs, and primitive men. There is sometimes
a spirit of low comedy about these delightful works, but in the so-called
Death of Procris (National Gallery, London) he created a poignant
scene of the utmost pathos and tenderness. He was a marvellous painter
of animals and the dog in this picture, depicted with a mournful dignity,
is one of his most memorable creations. Piero also painted portraits, the
finest of which is that of Simonetta Vespucci (Musée Condé, Chantilly),
in which she is depicted as Cleopatra with the asp around her neck. His
religious works are somewhat more conventional, although still distinctive,
and Frederick Hartt (A History of Italian Renaissance Art, 1970)
has written that His whimsical Madonnas, Holy Families, and Adorations
provide a welcome relief from the wholesale imitation of Raphael
in early Cinquecento Florence'. One of his outstanding religious works
is the Immaculate Conception (Uffizi, Florence), which seems to
have been the compositional model for the Madonna of the Harpies
by his pupil Andrea del Sarto.
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