ABOUT THIS BOOK

An original survey of the Renaissance painter’s life and work.

This book is a concise survey of the life of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) within his social and cultural surroundings. Delving into the artist’s deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how di Cosimo chose to live in squalor—eating nothing but boiled eggs cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. Sarah Blake McHam shows how the artist became a favorite among sophisticated patrons eager for pagan artworks featuring Greco-Roman mythological subjects as well as orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings. The result is a newly accessible introduction to the life of this important Renaissance artist.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Sarah Blake McHam is professor of art history at Rutgers University and author of Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History.

REVIEWS

"McHam takes the reader back to the delighted experiences of Piero di Cosimo’s first viewers, who not only enjoyed their physical beauty but the conversation and learned intellectual exchanges that they originally provoked. McHam discusses Piero’s paintings by type – mythologies, altarpieces, portraits – and clarifies the demands that each placed on the artist, bringing the reader close to Piero’s creative process. This book will re-insert Piero’s unusual paintings into the mainstream of Renaissance art history."

— John T. Paoletti, Wesleyan University

"Piero di Cosimo was a master of magical thinking. In clear and compelling prose, Sarah Blake McHam situates Piero in his time without losing sight of his art’s strange poetry, ranging from the marvelous to the disarmingly prosaic, be it the depiction of a delicate lapis lazuli vase or the bristly silhouette of an errant pig. While prone to pictorial joking and the most unconventional transformations of Greco-Roman myth, Piero is reaffirmed by McHam as nothing if not successful, all the more so for his originality and daring."

— Dennis Geronimus, New York University

"Piero di Cosimo’s bizarre paintings inspired the Surrealists – and are celebrated in Sarah Blake McHam’s myth-busting new study . . . In her informative study Piero di Cosimo, the artist, less celebrated than his direct peers Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo, appears as an underappreciated figure in the history of Renaissance art . . . In Blake McHam’s hands, the full scope of Piero’s talent is explored . . . This book does a wonderful job of exploring Piero’s context . . . Without the facts required to write a biography, this is a delightful, diligent study of the most playful, surprising artist of the Renaissance."

— Daily Telegraph

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction
Chapter 1 Mythologies
Chapter 2 Legendary Subjects
Chapter 3 Portraits
Chapter 4 Altarpieces
Chapter 5 Private Devotional Paintings
Chapter 6 Piero’s Artistic Legacy
Conclusion

Chronology
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Photo Acknowledgements
Index

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