Among the odder artistic compositions of the Florentine Quattrocento is a remarkable piece by the now relatively forgotten painter Piero di Cosimo, held by the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa and variously entitled “Vulcan and Aeolus” or “An Allegory of Civilization” (c. 1490). Despite being the subject of the painting, the god Vulcan — founder of both industry and civilization — is relegated to the left-hand corner of the canvas, an elderly man working at the fires of his kiln alongside the god of wind Aeolus, who minds the bellows.
The tableau itself is crowded with figures indifferent to the god’s presence. A man and woman cuddle with their infant, another man sleeps huddled in the fetal position, three craftsmen appear to raise a wooden house, a handsome and curious young man on horseback approaches Vulcan, and a giraffe perambulates in the distance past a hazy-blue horizon. The difficult-to-parse perspective only adds to the surrealism of the scene. As Rutgers University art historian Sarah Blake McHam explains in her well-argued, erudite, and elegant new book Piero di Cosimo: Eccentricity and Delight (2024), part of the British publisher Reaktion’s Renaissance Lives series, it is a “composition like no other in the Renaissance,” a work that’s “puzzling, even disconcerting.”
McHam relays the convincing argument that di Cosimo may have drawn this imagery from an obscure myth by Philostratus, in which every year on the island of Lemnos, all fires would be extinguished as a ritual sacrifice for the ancient gods. “Following that purification, they brought back fire,” she writes, “a haunting emblem of the return of life.” Beyond that, she suggests that “Vulcan and Aeolus” can be read as an allegory of di Cosimo’s own time and place —the Renaissance in Florence as the proverbial kilns refreshed with the bellows of classical ideas.
The last full-length academic study of the painter was Dennis Geronimus’s 2006 Piero di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange, which itself had only a handful of past scholarly works to draw upon, including a 1968 essay by Jean-Louis Vaudoyer and a 1946 book by Robert Langton Douglas. Capitalizing on a growing interest in di Cosimo due to exhibitions in Washington DC and Florence in 2014 and 2015, respectively, McHam’s book provides an ideal introduction to a painter largely known only to specialists, but whom Giorgio Vasari counted among the most important of his generation. By dividing her study into subject headings rather than organizing it chronologically (i.e. “Portraits,” “Altarpieces,” “Private Devotional Paintings,” etc.), McHam gives a rigorous and coherent account of the artist’s significance.
By far the most interesting portions of the book are those that deal with di Cosimo’s treatment of mythological figures. As McHam writes, “he took subjects like time-honoured Graeco-Roman myths or newly discovered secular writings and responded to them with verve and originality.” Nearly 40% of di Cosimo’s output was devoted to secular subjects, making him among the most fully Renaissance of Renaissance painters in that he was fully enraptured by and conversant with Italy’s pagan history. The canvases of di Cosimo are replete with satyrs and centaurs, titans and gods, all amidst a bucolic, sylvan, rusticated setting. Little survives about his biography, this man who, as Vasari wrote, “was very strange,” but it’s hard not to wonder if he was of Dionysus’s party, and he knew it.
The true measure of di Cosimo’s beautiful, pagan, Renaissance soul can be seen in a work such as “Perseus Liberating Andromeda” (c. 1510–15) at the Uffizi, in which the eponymous character stands atop a monstrous leviathan, the sea monster an aquatic chimera of several different creatures, wooly, scaled, and tusked. Though this dragon must be slayed, he remains a beast that is as wonderous as it is dangerous, much as the world the Renaissance imagined.
Piero di Cosimo: Eccentricity and Delight (2024), published by Reaktion Books, is available for purchase online and in bookstores.
