Among the many odder creative compositions of the Florentine Quattrocento is a exceptional piece by the now comparatively forgotten painter Piero di Cosimo, held by the Nationwide Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and variously entitled “Vulcan and Aeolus” or “An Allegory of Civilization” (c. 1490). Regardless of being the topic of the portray, the god Vulcan — founding father of each business and civilization — is relegated to the left-hand nook of the canvas, an aged man working on the fires of his kiln alongside the god of wind Aeolus, who minds the bellows.
The tableau itself is crowded with figures detached to the god’s presence. A person and girl cuddle with their toddler, one other man sleeps huddled within the fetal place, three craftsmen seem to boost a picket home, a good-looking and curious younger man on horseback approaches Vulcan, and a giraffe perambulates within the distance previous a hazy-blue horizon. The difficult-to-parse perspective solely provides to the surrealism of the scene. As Rutgers College artwork historian Sarah Blake McHam explains in her well-argued, erudite, and chic new guide Piero di Cosimo: Eccentricity and Delight (2024), a part of the British writer Reaktion’s Renaissance Lives sequence, it’s a “composition like no different within the Renaissance,” a piece that’s “puzzling, even disconcerting.”
McHam relays the convincing argument that di Cosimo might have drawn this imagery from an obscure fable by Philostratus, wherein yearly on the island of Lemnos, all fires could be extinguished as a ritual sacrifice for the traditional gods. “Following that purification, they introduced again fireplace,” she writes, “a haunting emblem of the return of life.” Past that, she means that “Vulcan and Aeolus” will be learn as an allegory of di Cosimo’s personal time and place —the Renaissance in Florence because the proverbial kilns refreshed with the bellows of classical concepts.
The final full-length educational examine of the painter was Dennis Geronimus’s 2006 Piero di Cosimo: Visions Stunning and Unusual, which itself had solely a handful of previous scholarly works to attract upon, together with a 1968 essay by Jean-Louis Vaudoyer and a 1946 guide by Robert Langton Douglas. Capitalizing on a rising curiosity in di Cosimo on account of exhibitions in Washington DC and Florence in 2014 and 2015, respectively, McHam’s guide gives an excellent introduction to a painter largely identified solely to specialists, however whom Giorgio Vasari counted among the many most necessary of his era. By dividing her examine into topic headings quite than organizing it chronologically (i.e. “Portraits,” “Altarpieces,” “Non-public Devotional Work,” and so on.), McHam offers a rigorous and coherent account of the artist’s significance.
By far essentially the most attention-grabbing parts of the guide are people who take care of di Cosimo’s remedy of mythological figures. As McHam writes, “he took topics like time-honoured Graeco-Roman myths or newly found secular writings and responded to them with verve and originality.” Practically 40% of di Cosimo’s output was dedicated to secular topics, making him among the many most totally Renaissance of Renaissance painters in that he was totally enraptured by and conversant with Italy’s pagan historical past. The canvases of di Cosimo are replete with satyrs and centaurs, titans and gods, all amidst a bucolic, sylvan, rusticated setting. Little survives about his biography, this man who, as Vasari wrote, “was very unusual,” but it surely’s laborious to not surprise if he was of Dionysus’s social gathering, and he knew it.
The true measure of di Cosimo’s stunning, pagan, Renaissance soul will be seen in a piece equivalent to “Perseus Liberating Andromeda” (c. 1510–15) on the Uffizi, wherein the eponymous character stands atop a monstrous leviathan, the ocean monster an aquatic chimera of a number of completely different creatures, wooly, scaled, and tusked. Although this dragon have to be slayed, he stays a beast that’s as wonderous as it’s harmful, a lot because the world the Renaissance imagined.
Piero di Cosimo: Eccentricity and Delight (2024), revealed by Reaktion Books, is offered for buy on-line and in bookstores.