"The exhibition is organized by the National Gallery of Art, Washington, and the Galleria degli Uffizi, Superintendency of Cultural Heritage for the City and the Museums of Florence"--Title page verso.

Inverting rules with obvious relish, Florentine artist Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) is known today—as he was in his own time—for his highly personal visual language, one capable of generating images of the most mesmerizing oddity. In this book, Dennis Geronimus overcomes the scarcity of information about the artist’s life and works—only one of the nearly sixty known works by Piero is actually signed and dated—and pieces together from extensive archival research the most complete and accurate account of Piero’s life and career ever written. Unfettered imagination was the sign under which Piero exercised his pictorial invention, and yet the complicated artist was also a product of his culture. The book fills gaps in the artist’s biography and provides intensive analysis of Piero’s protean imagery, discusses his various patrons and commissions, and lists his extant, lost, and uncertainly attributed works.

This is the first book on Piero di Cosimo (1461 1521) widely considered one of the most intriguing figures of the Florentine Renaissance to be written in English for over fifty years. Sharon Fermor presents new solutions to questions the function and iconography that have puzzled commentators hitherto, and examines Piero's approach to pictorial composition and to gesture that contribute to the distinctiveness of his oeuvre. Of crucial importance in this fresh evaluation of Piero's career is the author's explanation of the strategies employed by Vasari for his Life of Piero, written in the mid sixteenth-century. By exposing the misconceptions many still influential today that resulted from Vasari's account, she reveals that even Piero's most unusual paintings on mythological themes are in fact coherent and meaningful compositions, and not the product of an isolated eccentric at odds with the artistic community of his time."

The family book, a kind of diary written by and about the family for its various members, was established by scholars as a genre in Italy in the 1980s. Although initially regarded as an Italian genre, the family book can also be found in other parts of Europe. Nevertheless, the genre can be traced back to Florence, where it first emerged and consequently flourished with the lavish production of such documents. This abundance springs from the social structure of the city, where such texts were essential for establishing and cultivating the basis for the social promotion of Florentine families. This book presents a reconstruction of the evolution and persistency of Tuscan family books, as well as a study of several aspects of social history, including: reading and private libraries, domestic devotion, and the memory of historical events. Starting with the Renaissance, the investigation then broadens to the 17th-18th centuries and considers other forms of memory, such as private diaries and autobiographies. A final section is dedicated to the issue of memory in the egodocuments of early modern Europe. This book was translated by Susan Amanda George.

To whom should we ascribe the great flowering of the arts in Renaissance Italy? Artists like Botticelli and Michelangelo? Or wealthy, discerning patrons like Cosimo de' Medici? In recent years, scholars have attributed great importance to the role played by patrons, arguing that some should even be regarded as artists in their own right. This approach receives sharp challenge in Jill Burke's Changing Patrons, a book that draws heavily upon the author's discoveries in Florentine archives, tracing the many profound transformations in patrons' relations to the visual world of fifteenth-century Florence. Looking closely at two of the city's upwardly mobile families, Burke demonstrates that they approached the visual arts from within a grid of social, political, and religious concerns. Art for them often served as a mediator of social difference and a potent means of signifying status and identity. Changing Patrons combines visual analysis with history and anthropology to propose new interpretations of the art created by, among others, Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Raphael. Genuinely interdisciplinary, the book also casts light on broad issues of identity, power relations, and the visual arts in Florence, the cradle of the Renaissance.

Piero di Cosimo's Forest Fire is one of the best-known early Renaissance paintings in Britain. The authors discuss the subject and technique of the painting, its context and the artist's patron. The illustrations include x-rays and infrared photographs

Franklin's unprecedented examination of Vasari's work as a painter in relation to his vastly better-known writings fully illuminates these dual strands in Florentine art and offers us a clearer understanding of sixteenth-century painting in Florence than ever before." "The volume focuses on twelve painters: Perugino, Leonardo de Vinci, Piero di Cosimo, Michelangelo, Fra Bartolomeo, Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Andrea del Sarto, Franciabigio, Rosso Fiorentino, Jacopo da Pontormo, Francesco Salviati and Giorgio Vasari."--BOOK JACKET.

An original survey of the Renaissance painter’s life and work. This book is a concise survey of the life of the Florentine painter Piero di Cosimo (1462–1522) within his social and cultural surroundings. Delving into the artist’s deliberately idiosyncratic life, the book shows how di Cosimo chose to live in squalor—eating nothing but boiled eggs cooked fifty at a time in his painting glue. Sarah Blake McHam shows how the artist became a favorite among sophisticated patrons eager for pagan artworks featuring Greco-Roman mythological subjects as well as orthodox, but never ordinary, religious altarpieces and private devotional paintings. The result is a newly accessible introduction to the life of this important Renaissance artist.

Verrocchio worked in an extraordinarily wide array of media and used unusual practices of making to express ideas.