Inverting rules with obvious relish, Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) is known today―as he was in his own time―for his highly personal visual language, one capable of generating images of the most mesmerizing oddity. In this book, Dennis Geronimus overcomes the scarcity of information about the artist’s life and works―only one of the nearly sixty known works by Piero is actually signed and dated―and pieces together from extensive archival research the most complete and accurate account of Piero’s life and career ever written. Unfettered imagination was the sign under which Piero exercised his pictorial invention, and yet the complicated artist was also a product of his culture. The book fills gaps in the artist’s biography and provides intensive analysis of Piero’s protean imagery, discusses his various patrons and commissions, and lists his extant, lost, and uncertainly attributed works.

Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange

Geronimus, Dennis

Biographies & Memoirs

Yale University Press

Born in 1462, an auspicious time for hopeful young painters in Renaissance Florence, Piero di Cosimo left the city's artistic landscape forever changed upon his death in 1522. The singular vision of this highly esteemed painter is beautifully presented in this important publication, which accompanies the first-ever retrospective of di Cosimo's astonishing career. A contemporary of luminaries such as Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Piero di Cosimo was regarded in his day as a creative spirit of uncommon imagination. As a poet his fantastic inventions rivalled the verses of the shining lights of ancient Greece and Rome, whose myths and allegories he set out to transform in a strange language all his own. As a masterful painter of both sacred and profane subjects he could flit between complex, crowded compositions and scenes of intimate, tranquil lyricism. This groundbreaking publication demonstrates di Cosimo's range through in-depth discussions of individual works that help to substantiate specific interpretations and cases of authorship while also addressing the broader social and religious functions of image-making in the period. This unique publication makes a significant contribution to our understanding of a true Italian master, arguably Renaissance art's most spellbinding storyteller.

Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence

Arts & Photography

Brilliant, Virginia

FRANKLIN, David

History & Criticism

Lund Humphries

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Books by Geronimus, Dennis