In his Lives of the Artists, Vasari toasts ‘the great genius’ of Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo by describing his painting of drunken Silenus as giving ‘a feeling of the joy of life…one recognises a spirit very different and far distant from that of other painters, and a certain subtlety in the investigation of some of the deepest and most subtle secrets of Nature.’ Di Cosimo’s contemporaries included Botticelli, Leonardo and Michelangelo.
At the National Gallery in Washington this February, a retrospective of Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) offers a chance to review Vasari’s words and probably endorse them. With 40 of the artist’s pictures in front of us – partly thanks to the Uffizi’s first partnership with another museum for a painting show – it will be possible to see a wide variety of works.
Spread over six galleries, highlights include several rarely loaned paintings from Italian churches and the Uffizi’s fanciful Liberation of Andromeda (c. 1510–1513), which shows touches of Leonardo’s influence. But the centrepiece will surely be Washington’s own stunning and newly conserved The Visitation with Saint Nicholas and Saint Anthony Abbot (c. 1489/1490).
(This is an extract from Louise Nicholson’s ’12 Days’ selection of highlights for the year 2015.)
Also at the NGA: ‘From the Library: Florentine Publishing in the Renaissance’
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‘A revolutionary flame burned bright within him’: David Bindman (1940–2025)