The more I find about Piero...

the more I am surprised.
I read Panofsky's study on Piero di Cosimo, and I guess I have more questions now than I had before.

It seems that Piero was obsessed by primitivism. He devoted various cycles of his works to the primitive state of mankind and the beginnings of civilization (apart from the series on hunting and animals, he painted a cycle on Vulcanus and Prometheus, plus another one on Bacchus - in their quality of innovators and mythological fathers of civilization).

However, Vasari's description of Piero is in this respect even more striking (and worth reading directly).
According to Vasari, Piero was a sort of wild and misanthropic figure, in love with the "subtleties of nature" (sottigliezze della natura), and recoiling urban and Florentine life. Vasari says that Piero lived alone and secluded, mostly enjoying long solitary walks. He hated noises and sounds, particularly bells and il cantar dei frati (friars' singing). He preferred raw food (apart from hard-boiled eggs). He never cleaned is shop, nor he cared to prune the trees of his garden, allegando che le cose d'essa natura bisogna lasciarle custodire a lei, senza farvi altro ("claiming that nature itself should preserve her own things, without any other intervention").
Vasari resumes Piero's wildness in a sentence: una vita da uomo piuttosto bestiale che umano ("a life more adequate to a bestial than to a human man"). Panofsky underlines another of Vasari's sharp annotations: Piero si contentava di veder salvatico ogni cosa, come la sua natura ("vedere salvatico ogni cosa" is a rather nice and concise Italian expression not so easy to render, but probably the sense of this passage is: Piero "enjoyed looking at the savage qualities of things, as his own nature [was savage]").

When Piero died, Vasari was nine years old, and it is clear that his portrait of the artist comes from the strong impression that Piero's eccentric life-style had produced among the Florentines.
However, how does Vasari's colorful depiction of Piero's wildness fit with the very refined literary and mythological allusions of his art? It is clear that something is missing here.

A related question I have is that of the social environment that was receptive to this sort of themes. According to Panofsky, it is probable that the cycle on hunting and on Vulcanus was commissioned to Piero by a certain Francesco di Filippo Pugliese, who probably was, as we know from the Istorie of Giovanni Cambi, a rich merchant of popular origins (uomo popolano e merchatante e richo).
In the case of the series on Vulcanus, Panofsky convincingly argues that the commission from this rich merchant of low birth makes perfect sense: Vulcanus is, after all, the most plebeian god - the only real worker in the Greek pantheon.
However, Piero's other series is centered on the issues of primitivism, and is an elaborate reflection on this theme: what kind of reception did primitivism have in Florence between the 15th and 16th centuries? Should we say with Panofsky that the surprising relevance of this theme in Piero is most of all due to Piero's own idiosyncratic interests? (this is of course at least partially true, but it also seems that Piero found a rather favorable environment in Renaissance Florence for his primitivistic views, notwithstanding his savage temper...)