Piero di Cosimo

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Florentine, idiosyncratic (if not mentally unstable) painter. As well as religious paintings, he produced inventive pictures of mythological subjects, often featuring fauns and centaurs, like the Forest Fire (c. 1505; Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).

The son of Lorenzo di Piero, he was the pupil of Cosimo Rosselli, whose Christian name he adopted. Though influenced by Signorelli and Leonardo, he had a personal and whimsical imagination, which gives a vivid life to his representations of the satyrs and centaurs of classical fable, and also shows itself in the various animals he introduced into his pictures.

His Perseus and Andromeda (c. 1510–15; Uffizi, Florence) presents a typically fantastic dragon, and his mythological scene, formerly known as The Death of Procris (c. 1500; National Gallery, London), like the work of his contemporary Botticelli in its delicate pathos, introduces a strange-looking faun.

Besides the paintings that survive, however, Piero produced, like many of his contemporaries, transient artwork lost to posterity. Giorgio Vasari talks in his colourful life of Piero di Cosimo of his terrifying inventions made for the Carnival. He assisted Cosimo Rosselli in his frescoes in the Sistine Chapel (1481–82). He was also the author of some strongly characterized portraits that have an element of Leonardesque caricature. He was the master of Andrea del Sarto.

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