Piero di Cosimo was, in all likelihood, the strangest painter of the 15th century. “Men could perceive the strangeness of his brain,” wrote his biographer, Giorgio Vasari. “He knew no pleasure save that of going off by himself with his thoughts, letting his fancy roam, and building castles in air. . . . He was very strange.”
[img nocaption float=”left” width=”310″ height=”141″ render=”<%photoRenderType%>”]7776[/img]Vasari was writing around 1550, when many artists were strange. In the age of Mannerism, of exorbitantly antinatural distortions of color and form, some of the finest artists had been, as one said back then, “born under Saturn.” That was a polite way of saying that they were melancholic— or, as we would say today, deranged. Jacopo Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, even Michelangelo were so described.
But in Florence in the 1400s, a very different style dominated art, architecture, and culture in general. It was an aesthetic whose classical aspirations generally sought balance and harmony over conflict and irregularity. Such a style, whatever its other virtues, usually entailed a suppression of the imaginative faculty. And so, it is generally high noon in the art of the Florentine Renaissance: Brilliant daylight floods the surfaces of the perceptible world, banishing all doubt and disquiet, all trace of mystery or dreams.
Though often lauded as one of the preeminent achievements of the time, Botticelli’s line-drawing illustrations for The Divine Comedy have always struck me as a failure. The painter, lacking the poet’s myriad-mindedness, his intervals of darkness and ecstatic light, was (it would appear) incapable of drawing that which he had not actually seen. Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522), however, could. The subject of this nearly definitive exhibition at the National Gallery, in coordination with the Uffizi in Florence, he is the odd instance of a 16th-century painter condemned to labor within the constraints of 15th-century art.
He was a creature “of imagination all compact.” His 40-year career was evenly divided, with one half in the 15th century and the other in the 16th, and in his later years, he remained admirably up-to-date on the latest developments in art. But in accommodating these new, 16th-century influences, he seems to be importing them into the 15th-century frame of reference in which he was raised—and to which he remained essentially loyal to the end of his life.
If he had been born one or two generations later, his extravagant ancient gods would be emblazoned across an entire wall. As it is, they politely occupy the side of a cassone, or marriage chest. His sundry hirsute abominations, satyrs, centaurs, and the like would have been rendered in such a way as to convey their elemental violence. Instead, they are limned with the skill of a miniaturist and seem more comical than anything else. It is as though Mozart had survived (as he certainly could have survived) into the age of Liszt.
As for this new retrospective—incredibly, the first ever devoted to this essential master—there is little that needs to be said beyond the fact that it contains most of his important works and that they look radiantly fresh and beautiful. In a lifetime of museum-going, you will rarely see anything as good as—and may never see anything better than—his Madonna and Child Enthroned (ca. 1493) from the Museo degli Innocenti in Florence, or the Silenus and prancing satyrs of The Discovery of Honey (ca. 1500), or the Madonna and Child with Two Musician Angels (ca. 1505) from the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice.
In these works, Piero renders reality in such sharp detail—I am thinking of the blasted tree at the center of The Discovery of Honey—that he fundamentally transfigures the perceptible world until naturalism itself seems uncanny and strange.
But within the context of Piero’s strangeness, this exhibition provides abundant evidence of two things that are not usually associated with lunatics. The first is a certain practicality. Piero earned his money by painting the images that his patrons—preeminently Francesco del Pugliese—ordered from him, and at no point does he appear to have even considered doing anything else. If his patron wanted a conservative altarpiece like the Pala Pugliese (ca. 1483) or the Madonna and Child with Saints Onuphrius and Augustine (admittedly from early in his career, ca. 1480), he would happily oblige. If one requested a work charged with pagan mythology, or a portrait in the Netherlandish style, or the hieratic Volto Santo (ca. 1510), a work almost medieval in conception, Piero would supply that as well.
At the same time, from a stylistic or formal perspective, few artists of any importance have produced as diverse—indeed, fickle and inconsistent—a body of work as Piero has. Nor can one honestly claim to find any important and consistent evolution in his surviving art. The point is not that he adopted certain 16th-century motifs at the beginning of the 16th century. It is that, at any moment, he could revert to the language of an earlier age.
The Old Master tradition that Piero exemplified, and that he upheld with such distinction, was a closed system whose thousands of formal elements could be deployed and recombined as one wished. It sometimes seems as though whatever painting Piero last looked upon was the work that would find its way into his latest commission. In the Madonna and Child with Two Musician Angels, he had been looking at Leonardo. Hugo van der Goes, not to mention a number of other northern masters, inspired the Pala Pugliese. Perugino shows up as the animating force behind Prometheus Fashioning the First Man (ca. 1513), and Giorgione makes an appearance in the misty brushwork of the Liberation of Andromeda (ca. 1512). In the process, Piero whipsaws between pathos and broad humor, between respectful realism and a hieratic idealism.
There are also, it must be said, large shifts in quality, and not a few of the 44 works on view here have come down to us in a very imperfect state of preservation. But the overall impression left by this show is of an extremely high order of achievement, at points almost superhuman. We have waited a long time for this show, and the opportunity to see so many of Piero di Cosimo’s masterpieces in one place may never come again.
James Gardner is the translator, most recently, of Girolamo Fracastoro’s Latin Poetry for the I Tatti Renaissance Library (Harvard).
