Monday, June 13, 2005

Piero di Cosimo



I came across Piero di Cosimo's work by chance, and I'm rather excited.
Piero was a Florentine painter, active between the 15th and the 16th century. In particular, he produced a group of works on the primitive state of mankind (now dispersed in various museums around the world).
Most of all I was impressed by a work now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, a hunting scene (see the image above). In it, Piero seems to link hunting and violence against animals with the origin of violence among human beings (see for instance the killing of the man on the right side of the painting). This made me curious, as last year I found this idea in Erasmus (in his adage on war, dulce bellum inexpertis).
Piero was also interested in the origin of arts and inventions, and I am wondering if his mythological imagery is close to that of Francis Bacon in his discussion of the Hunt of Pan.
I found that Piero's primitivism has been discussed by Erwin Panofsky in an essay of 1939 ('The Early History of Man in Two Cycles of Paintings by Piero di Cosimo'), also available in his Studies in Iconography (1962): I'm rather curious to read it.

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