Among the weaker artistic compositions of Florentine Quattrocento, there is a remarkable piece of the painter now relatively forgotten Piero Di Cosimo, owned by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and variously entitled “Vulcan and Aeolus” or “an allegory of civilization” (c. 1490). Although he makes the subject of painting, the Vulcan god – founder of industry and civilization – is relegated to the left corner of the canvas, an elderly man working in the fires of his oven alongside the Aeolus Wind God, who takes care of the bellows.
The painting itself is crowded with figures indifferent to the presence of God. A man and a woman cuddle with their baby, another man sleeps huddled in the fetal position, three craftsmen seem to raise a wooden house, a beautiful and curious young man on horseback approaches vulcan, and a giraffe is lost above a hazé blue horizon. The difficult perspective to demonstrate only adds the surrealism of the scene. As explained by the art historian at Rutgers University, Sarah Blake Mcham in her new well -argued, scholarly and elegant book Piero di Cosimo: eccentricity and pleasure (2024),, Part of the British publisher Reaktion Renaissance life Series, it is a “composition like no other during the Renaissance”, a “confusing, even disconcerting” work.
MCHAM relays the convincing argument that Di Cosimo may have drawn this image from an obscure myth of philosratus, in which each year on the island of Lemnos, all fires would be extinguished as a ritual sacrifice for the ancient gods. “After this purification, they brought fire,” she wrote, “an obsessive emblem of the return of life”. Beyond that, she suggests that “Vulcan and Aeolus” Can be read like an allegory of time and the place of Di Cosimo – the Renaissance in Florence as the proverbial ovens refreshed with the bellows of classical ideas.
The latest full length academic study of the painter was 2006 of Dennis Geronimus Piero di Cosimo: beautiful and strange vision,, Who himself had only a handful of past learned works on which to rely, including an essay of 1968 by Jean-Louis Vaudoyer and a book of 1946 by Robert Langton Douglas. Capitalizing on an increasing interest in Di Cosimo due to exhibitions at Washington DC and Florence in 2014 and 2015, the MCHAM book provides an ideal introduction to a painter widely known only by specialists, but which Giorgio Vasari counted among the most important of its generation. By dividing his study into subject headings rather than to organize in chronological way (that is to say “portraits”, “altarpieces”, “private devotion paintings”, etc.), MCHAM gives a rigorous and coherent report of the artist's meaning.
By far, the most interesting parts of the book are those which deal with the treatment of mythological figures by Di Cosimo. As MCHAM writes, “he took subjects as suspended graceco-romans or newly discovered lay-back writings and replied with Verve and Originality.” Almost 40% of the production of DI Cosimo was devoted to secular subjects, which makes it among the most entirely the rebirth of the painters of the Renaissance in that it was entirely rabid and informed of Italian pagan history. The canvases of Di Cosimo are filled with satyrs and centaurs, titans and gods, all in the middle of a bucolic, Sylvan and rustic framework. Little survives his biography, this man who, as Vasari wrote, “was very strange”, but it is difficult not to wonder if he was from the Dionysus feast, and he knew it.
The true measure of the beautiful, pagan and the soul of the Renaissance of Di Cosimo can be seen in a work as “Liberative Andromeda” (c. 1510-15) In the Uffizi, in which the eponymous character stands at the top of a monstrous leviathan, the sea monster an aquatic chimera of several different, woolly, ladder and rolled creatures. Although this dragon must be killed, there remains a beast as wonderful as it is dangerous, just like the world that the Renaissance imagined.
Piero di Cosimo: eccentricity and pleasure (2024), published by Books reactionis available for online purchase and bookstores.
