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Piero di Cosimo, The Immaculate Conception with
SS Francis, Jerome, Bonaventure, Bernard, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, 1510s,
Panel, 184 x 178 cm, San Francesco, Fiesole.
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Of this group of Florentine painters Piero di Cosimo is the
eldest having spent most of his career in the quattrocento. Piero was a pupil
of Cosimo Rosselli, whose first name he took as a patronym. Reconstructing his
oeuvre depends on Vasari in the absence of no signed, documented, or dated
works by him. Contemporary with Leonardo, Piero formed his style after that
influential master, and like his illustrious contemporary he was interested in
the process of artistic creation. Piero seems to have been ill equipped to cope
with the new dramatic altarpieces by Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and Fra
Bartolommeo; he was out of step with these innovations because “the altarpiece
was changing in ways that were foreign to his talents.”[1]
Piero did try painting altarpieces but where religious art was concerned, it
was the small devotional panels that he was most comfortable with. The small
size of these implies that his patrons recognized that he struggled with
painting large scale altarpieces.
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Piero di Cosimo, The Adoration of the Christ
Child, 1505, Oil on wood, diameter 140 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome.
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Another
reason for Piero’s lack of success on the larger scale was despite
responsiveness to the modernizing currents in Florentine art, Piero was unable
to take a step forward without a related increase in what Freedberg calls his
singularity, his strangeness which put him outside the mainstream of
cinquecento Florentine art.[2]
Something of this bizarre quality is seen in his Adoration in the
Borghese which contains perplexing iconography such as Joseph relegated to the
background. Piero’s odd iconography may
never be convincingly elucidated, and seems to be related to his psychological
personality. Yet another reason for Piero’s lack of fit amongst the new
painting in cinquecento painting was his difficulty in handling composition: he
seems to have had problems with reconciling figures and backgrounds; he compensated
for this deficiency by avoiding complicated poses, keeping figures in simple
planes, and rejecting any bold foreshortenings.[3]
Where he does have affinities with the new generation of Florentine artists is his
assimilation of the language of Leonardo’s Florentine compositions into his
small religious commissions For example, Fermor sees the twisted form of the
music-making angel in Piero’s Virgin and Child with Two Angels
resembling Leonardo’s Leda drawings. The influence of Leonardo’s Virgin and
St Anne in these religious compositions which contain overlapping figures
and inter-locking forms seems to be a point of reference too.[4]
Finally, some of Piero’s works from his final decade return us to the
altarpieces of Fra Bartolommeo, such as his Lucca altarpiece which Piero
appears to have known.
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Piero di Cosimo, Virgin and Child with Two
Angels, 1505-10, Panel, 116 x 85 cm, Collezione Vittorio Cini, Venice.
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Leonardo da Vinci, The Virgin and Child with St
Anne, c. 1510, Oil on wood, 168 x 130 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.
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