by The Florentine Renaissance artist Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522) was an odd man. He lived on a diet of eggs only, which he boiled in batches of 50 in the same water he prepared to glue. He lived in dirt, in uncleaned rooms and with a garden left to run wild. He was afraid of thunderstorms, loud coughs and brothers’ chants. The ideas for his paintings came from hours spent staring at a wall on which sick people had released their spittle; he saw cities, landscapes and battles in the grim marks left behind. By the end of his life, he was – according to Giorgio Vasari – “so strange and eccentric that nothing could be done with him”.
The Piero shown by Sarah Blake McHam, a professor of art history at Rutgers, is quite different. In his informative study of Piero di Cosimo, the artist, who is less famous than his direct contemporaries Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo, appears as an under-appreciated figure in the history of Renaissance art.
Born Piero di Lorenzo to a Florentine blacksmith – his surname later came from his apprenticeship with the artist Cosimo Rosselli – Piero had a much more fortunate career than his strange stories would suggest. After a successful apprenticeship, in which he helped his master paint a scene for the Sistine Chapel, his career was on a sure footing. It was the golden boy of the wealthy aristocracy who wanted to decorate their homes with scenes from Greek and Roman myth, and was the favorite choice of patrons looking for the unique mix of finery and detail in their religious paintings. (In one scene when Mary visited Elizabeth, he sent a monkey crawling on top of a palazzo as if on a rope.)
Despite his success, however, Piero was almost forgotten on the roll call of Renaissance artists. It was not until 2014 that there was a major exhibition of his work at the National Gallery of American Art, and it was in 1946 that he received scholarly attention with a monograph by Robert Langton Douglas. However, institutional and academic reputation are not the same. Piero had other fans. George Eliot made him a character in Romola, her novel about Renaissance Florence, and the Surrealists of the 1930s claimed him as their noble ancestor.
Blake McHam’s book is part of the revival of interest in Piero in recent years. No, Blake McHam tells us, a biography – details other than those apparently made up by Vasari are too thin on the ground – nor a study of the “development” of Piero’s style – this would be “treasonous”, he says she , any chronology is impossible when so few paintings are dated – but to study the different genres of Piero’s art: his secular myths and legends, his portraits, his altarpieces, and his private devotional paintings.
In the hands of Blake McHam, the full scope of Piero’s talent is explored. Despite his lack of literary education – he died without a book in his possession; there is a question mark over whether he could even write – Piero’s secular scenes are able to package old myths in new ways. The large panels depicting the prehistory of man – a Hunting Scene, The Return from the Hunt, and Forest Fire – are brutal. Animal-like people exploit human-like animals with “blood-curdling motivation”. Early humans seem to have been little more than cannibals. These images are radical in Renaissance art, but they did not come from nowhere: Piero was painting in response to works by Lucretius, Vitruvius, Pliny and Boccaccio. The painter was better educated than he is given credit for, or his patrons knew what details from classical texts told him to work his extraordinary imagination.
Blake McHam, too, shows Piero’s unique approach to religious painting. In his telling, Vasari’s statement that the artist was always “looking for difficulties” is not only a reference to his technical success but also a reference to the divinity of his paintings. In one of his altarpieces, The Visitation of Bari and Anthony Abbot, the usual chronology of biblical stories is abandoned in favor of something much more experimental: stories are painted as frescoes within the painting’s landscape, or so hidden they must be. looking for. Instead of the altar being a site of Christian teaching, it has become something more experimental: a religious puzzle, an exoteric dance.
This book does a great job of exploring Piero’s context: the literary background of his work; his connections with other painters from Botticelli to Leonardo. But it’s hard not to feel that something is missing: his Piero is unorthodox but not eccentric; idiosyncratic but not really weird. The extent of his real-life outrages – the cannibalistic paintings, the tendency towards heresy – is occasionally minimized in an attempt to separate him from the egg-eating myths (written by Vasari, Blake McHam argues, because he was disappointed with output Piero). But it’s not Blake McHam’s fault that she can’t replace myth with story. Without the facts needed to write a biography, this is a delightful, painstaking study of the Renaissance’s most playful and fascinating artist.
Francesca Peacock is the author Pure Wit: The Revolutionary Life of Margaret Cavendish. Piero di Cosimo is published by Reaktion at £17.95. To order your copy, call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books
