XV
PIERO DI COSIMO
1462 - 1521
FLORENTINE SCHOOL
"THE DEATH OF PROCRIS"
(NATIONAL GALLERY)
Cephalus kneels at the head of Procris, whom he has accidentally shot. Painted in tempera on poplar. 2 ft. 1 1/2 in. h. x 6 ft. w. (0.647 x 1.828).

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CHAPTER XV

OF THE DEEPS OF POETRY THAT MAY BE WITHIN THE ROUGH OUTER MAN

WORKING at the same time in Florence as Verrocchio was a painter, COSIMO ROSSELLI, now chiefly known to fame as the master of the artists, Piero di Cosimo and Fra Bartolommeo. But Cosimo Rosselli was an artist of fine gifts, who was employed under Botticelli on work for the Sistine Chapel, in which he painted several frescoes. Cosimo Rosselli (1439-1507) came of artist forefathers.

PIERO DI COSIMO
1462 - 1521

Of about the same age as Filippino Lippi, Lorenzo di Credi, and Leonardo da Vinci, was PIERO DI COSIMO, whose picturesque and tuneful name was a tribute to his master, Cosimo Rosselli. Piero di Cosimo was the son of Lorenzo, an auger-maker of Florence ; at twenty (1482) he went with his master, Cosimo Rosselli, to aid him in his work on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel. But though the direct pupil of Cosimo Rosselli, he became an eager student of the art of Antonio Poliamolo, to whom he owed his knowledge of the nude, and was strongly affected by the work of Luca Signorelli, of Filippino Lippi, and of Leonardo da Vinci, which was being wrought about him, and he owes tribute to Botticelli. His paintings, being scattered throughout the great public galleries of Europe and the great private collections-more particularly in England-are widely known. His fine [122] Venus, Mars, and Cupid at Berlin proves that his eyes had beheld Botticelli's masterpiece now in London, and his equally celebrated portrait of La Bella Simonetta at Chantilly reveals that not only had his eyes lingered upon Botticelli's craftsmanship, but that the beauty of the golden age of Florence and her queen of love had sat to him-this portrait used to be known as Cleopatra, and bore the credit of Pollaiuolo's name.

Piero di Cosimo was one of the famous jury appointed to decide on the site for Michelangelo's statue of David in Florence, and he pays tribute to the fact by painting the much-talked-of statue into the background of his Portrait of a Warrior in London.

Contemporary of Lorenzo di Credi, but of what different stuff, was Piero di Cosimo. For him was no smug painting of formal devotions ; for him no mere imitations, no mimicries. His art utters the spirit of the age in consummate fashion. All the glamour of the new learning is there; the gods of antique days have come out of hiding and frisk abroad. Piero di Cosimo was a very Florentine of Florentines, the republican blood in him, a live individual, frank of tongue, witty, arrogant, whimsical, odd, his quaint soul sensitive to the subtlest delicacies of colour, grim of character, exquisitely sympathetic to sorrow and pain. No more perfect example of his skill of artistry has come down to us than the glowing harmonies of his Death of Procris at the National Gallery in London. Here we have very Florence of the late fourteen-hundreds. Here are the pagan gods stepping out of their long hiding in the shady groves, and careering abroad in Italian landscape. Within the space of the long narrow span of the painted surface, Piero di Cosimo has uttered his poem of love and jealousy, of death and remorse, in lyric fashion.

XVI
FRA BARTOLOMMEO
1475 - 1517
(LOUVRE)
"VIRGIN AND CHILD, WITH SAINTS"

The whispered [123] slander that has sent the jealous Procris into her hiding-place in the thicket to watch her lover's meeting with an Unknown One, has also sent her to her death, when, leaping from hiding to confess her false suspicion, she is slain by the arrow of her lover as he quickly lets fly, startled by the rustle of what he took to be a wild beast in the bush ; and as the life flows scarlet from her wounded throat, she tells her tale-and unseen Jupiter, bending his ear to hear the piteous tragedy, did well to change her into a star. 'Tis a literary theme, it's true enough, and the pictured sonnet needs a book of the words to explain it-therein the art is faulty enough, as indeed was much of the art of the Florentines-but, apart from this, what an exquisite thing it is ! the pity of it, shown in the bereaved satyr and mourning dog, the wondrous landscape bathed in the glamour of that strange unheeding Nature which hesitates or halts a moment never, even to shed a tear, though death strike out of the blue at one of her myriad children. The sun shines on, the storks hie them across the heavens to their own wayfaring, all Nature heedless of the pitiful tragedy. How wondrous well the grim vision of this Piero di Cosimo has caught the cruelty and the pity of it ! and with what exquisite poetry his hand has uttered what he has felt !

Here is the eternal question that is stirring the hearts of thinking men in this Florence of the end of the fourteen-hundreds-that question writ across the art of Leonardo da Vinci in such masterly fashion. They were at grips with life, these men. And Piero di Cosimo not the least of them.

A solitary man, careless of the world's opinion of him, he had little but contempt for the things that men call the prizes of life. He was concerned only with uttering life as he saw and felt it. Shutting himself up to brood over his[124] own ideas, and detesting to let others see him at his work, the world judged him eccentric. Sensitive and irritable, with nerves that jarred at the crying of babes or coughing of men that passed by ; fretted to madness by flies ; and loathing the dark ; when the humdrum folk saw him go by in the street they tapped their skulls significantly. But Piero di Cosimo lived in a world of dreams. People winked and nodded at each other, jerking the thumb of disdain at the untended, unpruned fruit-trees in his garden. A virile, odd fellow, full of arrogance and self-will, careless of comfort-his meals were of the hard-boiled eggs which he could cook as he boiled his glue, thereby saving fuel, and needed little elaborate dishing. He had the tricks and habits of the absent-minded-they said he talked overmuch, repeated the things he said to weariness ; but they would laugh themselves to tears at times, for his thinking was wide and various, and in a good vein he was splendid company-a waggish soul, dry with the Florentine grim humour. But the doctors had no love for him ; nor he for the doctors-he scoffed at physician or apothecary, and would have none of their nostrums, whereby he suffered no little, for, in his last years he fretted and fumed at the maiming paralysis that numbed his hands as he doddered about his studio, cursing the ill-luck that thwarted his hand's skill from giving utterance to the will of his brain, and reviling the plague that had fallen upon him, which would not even let him scratch his own irritating hands. But the grimness of the man never knew paralysis ; at the last he would scoff at the idea of degradation in capital punishment, praising it instead as " a fine thing to go to death in the open air amidst a throng of people." His dramatic vision rose supreme, even as he gazed at the end of things.

Poetic, of infinite invention and exquisite imagination, [125] sensitive and quick to all the moods of life, he saw visions in the clouds and evolved poems out of the stained surfaces of walls. With a fine contempt for wordy philosophies, he concerned himself solely with life ; and though all he wrought, whether portrait or religious picture or pagan mythology, was done with consummate skill, it was with the pagan gods in their wild sport and tragedies amidst the woods and meadows and by the seashore that he found his chief delight.

He was fond of the long, wide panel of little height. The Battle of the Centaurs and the Lapithae shows him in his love of wild creatures, whether real or imaginary- proves, as does all his art, his passion for the wildness of Nature, Nature unspoiled by man's ordering, that Nature which, as he affirmed, " ought not to be interfered with."

Piero di Cosimo died in 1521, at Florence.

Of his pupils, one was to come to great fame, for there came from his training the genius of a tailor's son, whom the world knows as Andrea del Sarto.