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Piero di Cosimo Facts

Piero di Cosimo Facts
Piero di Cosimo was an Italian Renaissance artist, born in Florence in 1462 and best known for his fanciful and eccentric mythological characters and paintings. His birth name was Piero di Lorenzo and his father was a goldsmith. Piero di Cosimo's name as an artist was derived from his master Cosimo Rosselli, under whom he apprenticed and collaborated with when painting the Sistine Chapel's fresco "Sermon on the Mount". Piero di Cosimo was a talented portrait painter and also created several religious paintings, in addition to his classical mythology scenes. His fresco landscape behind the "Sermon on the Mount" in the Sistine Chapel is the only known fresco that he created or collaborated on.
Interesting Piero di Cosimo Facts:
Piero di Cosimo was eccentric in his day-to-day life, so afraid of fire that he rarely cooked his food before eating it.
Piero di Cosimo consumed a large amount of hard boiled eggs. He cooked a large number at once so as to have to avoid using fire often. He often cooked 50 at a time.
Piero di Cosimo was petrified of thunderstorms, did not clean his studio, and didn't trim the fruit trees on his property - leading the writer Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) to write that Piero di Cosimo "lived more like a beast than a man."
In 1481 Piero di Cosimo worked on the Sistine Chapel's fresco "Sermon on the Mount" with Cosimo Roselli, his mentor. It was the only fresco Piero is known to have worked on. Piero created the landscape of the fresco.
One of Piero di Cosimo's most famous portraits include "Portrait of Simonetta Vespucci" - oil on panel painting now located in the Musée Condé, Chantilly, France.
Piero di Cosimo's most famous religious works include "Madonna and Child Enthroned with Sts Peter, John the Baptist, Dominic, and Nicholas of Bari" now at St. Louis Art Museum in Missouri, "The Visitation with Saints Nicholas and Anthony" now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, "St. Mary Magdalene" now at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica in Rome, "St. John the Evangelist" now at the Honolulu Museum of Art, "Virgin with Child, St. John the Baptist and an Angel" now at the Sao Paulo Museum of Art in San Paulo, "The Adoration of the Christ Child" now at Galleria Borghese in Rome, "Immaculate Conception with Saints" now located in Uffizi, Florence, and "Madonna and Child with Saints and Angels" now located at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Piero di Cosimo's most famous mythological art includes "Venus, Mars, and Cupid" now at Staatliche Museum in Berlin, "Vulcan and Aeolus" at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, "Tritons and Nereids" now in the Altomani collection in Milan, "The Finding of Vulcan on Lemnos" now at Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, "Perseus Frees Andromeda" in Uffizi, Florence, and "The Myth of Prometheus: now at the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida.
According to documents Piero di Cosimo died of the plague on April 12th, 1522, although some sources give his date of death as 1521.


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