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Piero di Cosimo: Eccentricity and Delight

(Hardback)


Publishing Details

Full Title:

Piero di Cosimo: Eccentricity and Delight

Contributors:

By (Author) Sarah Blake McHam

ISBN:

9781789148428

Publisher:

Reaktion Books

Imprint:

Reaktion Books

Publication Date:

1st May 2024

UK Publication Date:

1st February 2024

Country:

United Kingdom

Classifications

Readership:

General

Fiction/Non-fiction:

Non Fiction

Other Subjects:

History of art
European history: Renaissance

Physical Properties

Physical Format:

Hardback

Number of Pages:

240

Dimensions:

Width 138mm, Height 216mm

Description

This book is an original, cogent account of the singular Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462-1522), providing a concise survey of his life within his social, cultural and literary backdrop. Delving into the artist's deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how Piero chose to live in squalor, and eat nothing but boiled eggs, which (according to Vasari's famous Lives of the Artists) he cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. This book shows how the artist became the favourite of sophisticated patrons, who were eager to decorate their residences with pagan Greco-Roman mythological subjects. Piero's vividly imagined portrayals led to his cornering the market on these commissions. At the same time his more orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings also won the admiration of leading Florentine families.

Reviews

"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
"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

Author Bio

Sarah Blake McHam is Professor of Art History at Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA and author of Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The Legacy of the Natural History (2013).

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