Monsters and merry mayhem

WHILE Michelangelo, Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci were all making worlds of ideal perfection, their contemporary, Piero di Cosimo, had set out on a different, more twisted path, bewitching his fellow Florentines with his visual fables and mythological fantasies. The work that made the greatest impression was the “Cart of Death”, an elaborate float pulled by black buffaloes, with skeletons popping out of their tombs whenever the grim procession stopped to chant a dirge. If he never quite achieved the grace of Botticelli’s “ La Primavera”, Piero’s ability to conjure the macabre, the monstrous and the miraculous offers its own distinctive pleasures and a rare insight into the more neurotic recesses of the Renaissance imagination.

A new show in Washington, DC, marks the first time in over 75 years that this under-appreciated painter, who gave everything he touched an off-kilter spin, has been exhibited in America. So peculiar did Piero’s fellow artists find his work that Giorgio Vasari, an art historian writing a couple of decades after his death, padded his sparse knowledge of the painter’s life with a host of speculative eccentricities. Piero lived, the inventive Vasari wrote, like the beasts of the field. He dined on nothing but boiled eggs, and “knew no pleasure save that of going off by himself with his thoughts, letting his fancy roam and building his castles in the air”.

Whether or not Piero was as odd as Vasari claimed—and recent scholarship has dug up only a few additional facts—the paintings do suggest someone with a unique perspective. Commissioned to paint an altarpiece, Piero provides the typical assortment of sacred figures clustered around the Virgin’s throne, but he invests secondary details with an almost hallucinatory vividness that transforms the formula into something both more magical and more disquieting.

In “Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints Elizabeth of Hungary, Catherine of Alexandria, Peter, and John the Evangelist with Angels” (1493) it is the broken wheel of Catherine’s martyrdom, the jewelled crown and roses strewn about the pavement, that steal the show. In “Adoration of the Child” (c.1490-1500), Piero seems as transfixed by the flowery meadow and wriggling tadpoles (symbolic of new life, and thus the Resurrection to come) as he is by the sacred figures. In each case these minutiae are rendered with such hyper-real precision that they might have come from the brush of a 16th-century Salvador Dali.

But it is in his mythological scenes that Piero truly comes into his own. These mysterious panels were often intended for the bedchambers of wealthy Florentines, who seemed to relish the brew of violence and unbridled sensuality that was Piero’s stock in trade. “A Hunting Scene” (c.1490) depicts a Hobbesian war of all against all as wild creatures are set upon with glee by man-beasts as savage as their victims. In the companion panel, “Return from the Hunt” (1505-07), the gentler realm of domesticity is explored with equal delight, as if Piero is tracing the path from barbarism to civilisation. The strangeness of these scenes was captured by W.H. Auden in his “Bucolics”. “Sylvan meant savage in those primal woods/ Piero di Cosimo so loved to draw,” he wrote, “Where nudes, bears, lions, sows with women’s heads/ Mounted and murdered and ate each other raw…”

One explanation for Piero’s popularity—both while he was alive and later—is that he approaches even the most violent tale with infectious exuberance. In a later work, “Liberation of Andromeda” (pictured, detail), based on an Ovid tale, an airborne Perseus daintily alights on the monster about to make mincemeat of the fair maiden and belabours the creature with his puny sword. Piero has lavished most of his affection on the doomed monster, a comical and oddly sympathetic creature. A picturesque bay is populated by exotic characters; some play strange instruments while others fling themselves about in wild abandon. Though the term “surreal” would not be coined for another four centuries, it seems completely apt for the work of this quirky genius.

^{“Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence” is at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, from February 1st until May 3rd, and at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence from June 23rd until September 27th.}