Piero di Cosimo: Between poetry and paint

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Piero di Cosimo’s work is not as widely known as that of some of his Renaissance contemporaries, but an illuminating exhibition gives visitors to Washington and Florence a chance to see it this year

The current exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC (closes 3 May 2015, touring to Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, 23 June–27 September 2015) is the first-ever show devoted to Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522). Piero was a Florentine painter working at the same time as his slightly older compatriot Leonardo da Vinci.    Piero’s art was noted for its unusually poetic mood and originality. The ‘first art historian’, Vasari,   described him as an eccentric bachelor. Sensitive and private, Piero had powerful aversions to grating noise and was a lover of nature as well as a devout Christian. (Vasari knew Andrea del Sarto, a pupil of Piero’s, so he would have heard about Piero’s character directly.)

Piero worked on religious and secular commissions for Florentine institutions and collectors. He was described as a master of the fantastic. When we think of painters of fantasy during the Renaissance we inevitably think of Hieronymus Bosch  (c.1450–1516). No artist of that era compares to Bosch in terms of invention, sophistication and memorability in painted visions and it is best for us to think of Piero as a colleague of Fra Filippino Lippi, Botticelli and Leonardo and as an artist in the Italian tradition of grotteschi and pictura poesis rather than of outright fantasy in the Northern European manner. André Breton, who regarded himself as the leader of the Surrealists, claimed Piero as a spiritual ancestor of Surrealism,   a decidedly mixed compliment, considering how terrible and justly neglected some of Breton’s pre-Surrealist idols were.

The Portinari Altarpiece, by Netherlandish artist Hugo van der Goes (c.1430–82), revolutionized Florentine painting when it arrived in Florence in May 1483. At once the dry, flat style of the Italian ‘primitives’ (Cimabue – the earliest of Vasari’s  artists in his Lives of the Artists – and Giotto) seemed dowdy and lifeless; Northern European naturalism became an ideal. Piero was very receptive to the influence of the Portinari Altarpiece and Netherlandish stylistic traits can be seen in his mature work.

Piero was famed for his paintings on mythological subjects. Satyr Mourning a Nymph (c.1495) is a favourite in the National Gallery, London. The authors describe The Liberation of Angelica (c.1510-3) as Piero’s masterpiece of fantasy. It shows the hero Ruggiero standing on the back of a swimming dragon, sword raised, ready to slay the monster. Piero conformed to ideals of emotional restraint that artists such as Andrea Mantegna and Leonardo began to break down in the 1470s, which gives Piero’s battles and hunting scenes an incongruous tranquillity. While Andrea Mantegna (1431–1506) showed his battling sea gods snarling and yelling, Piero’s participants in terror and bloodshed are as calm as matrons at a tea party.

Piero was an accomplished portraitist. Most of his portraits survive in religious paintings, with the heads of donors conveying strongly individual personalities. Piero used the profile format for portraits even after it went out of style. His love of nature can be seen in his many depictions of animals. He must have been the first painter to depict water spiders and tadpoles. Besides common wild and domestic fauna, Piero portrayed exotic beasts such as lions and giraffes. All this expertise assisted Piero when he invented centaurs, satyrs and dragons. Unlike many artists of his era, he relied primarily on his imagination and his first-hand observations rather than inspiration taken from antique art.

The only recorded journey Piero undertook was to Rome, where he may have assisted his master Cosimo Rosselli (from whom he would take the appellation ‘di Cosimo’) to paint a fresco on a wall of the Sistine Chapel.  The facts that he did not otherwise travel outside Florence and his art was not in demand in other cities meant that the qualities of Piero’s art were matters of hearsay as relatively few people outside of his region saw his art. (The first book on Piero was not published until 1898.) He did not produce any great murals and no examples of his miniature illustrations have yet been located, though miniatures were part of his output.

Piero’s paintings are widely dispersed in collections of Italy, Great Britain and the USA so this exhibition and catalogue are unique opportunities to investigate the myths and reality of the man and his art. Forty-five paintings (most of them from North American collections and together comprising the majority of Piero’s known works) are included in the Washington show.

This catalogue discusses the works in detail and mentions other pieces. Professor Dennis Geronimus looks at the possible influence on Piero of the Roman poet Lucretius’s philosophical poem De rerum Natura. Various contributors suggest attributions and dates of pictures; Virginia Brilliant gives a history of Piero’s work in the USA. Several scholars comment on links between Piero and Filippino Lippi (1459-1504), showing how the artists often shared compositions, subjects and style. (Lippi would make an ideal subject for a follow-up exhibition.)

A technical report gathers scientific data about the painter’s materials and techniques. It seems that Piero did not habitually make detailed underdrawings before painting, sometimes drawing forms loosely in dilute paint or ink, though he varied his methods, as Vasari mentions a detailed cartoon that he prepared for transfer. A number of Piero’s mythological paintings are on wooden panels and formed components of multi-part altarpieces or decorated items of furniture (including cassoni, the plural of cassone  – an elaborately adorned chest, usually for storing linen).  

This catalogue advances Piero scholarship and acts as a thorough overview of his art. For anyone with some knowledge of Quattrocento (Italian 15th-century) art, this volume will prove illuminating and enjoyable.

The catalogue, Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence by Gretchen A. Hirschauer and Dennis Geronimus, is published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 2015. 248pp, fully illustrated, $40.00 (pbk; hbk also available). ISBN 978 0 89468 392 3 (pbk)