Piero di Cosimo: Eccentricity and Delight (Renaissance Lives)

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.

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.