Inverting rules with obvious relish, Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) is known today—as he was in his own time—for his highly personal visual language, one capable of generating images of the most mesmerizing oddity. In this book, Dennis Geronimus overcomes the scarcity of information about the artist’s life and works—only one of the nearly sixty known works by Piero is actually signed and dated—and pieces together from extensive archival research the most complete and accurate account of Piero’s life and career ever written.
Unfettered imagination was the sign under which Piero exercised his pictorial invention, and yet the complicated artist was also a product of his culture. The book fills gaps in the artist’s biography and provides intensive analysis of Piero’s protean imagery, discusses his various patrons and commissions, and lists his extant, lost, and uncertainly attributed works.
This is the first book on Piero di Cosimo (1461–1521) widely considered one of the most intriguing figures of the Florentine Renaissance – to be written in English for over fifty years. Sharon Fermor presents new solutions to questions the function and iconography that have puzzled commentators hitherto, and examines Piero's approach to pictorial composition and to gesture that contribute to the distinctiveness of his oeuvre.Of crucial importance in this fresh evaluation of Piero's career is the author's explanation of the strategies employed by Vasari for his Life of Piero, written in the mid sixteenth-century. By exposing the misconceptions – many still influential today – that resulted from Vasari's account, she reveals that even Piero's most unusual paintings on mythological themes are in fact coherent and meaningful compositions, and not the product of an isolated eccentric at odds with the artistic community of his time.
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