Piero di Cosimo (also known as Piero di Lorenzo) (January 2, 1462 – April 12, 1522) was an Florentine painter.
The son of a Florentine goldsmith, Piero was born in Florence and apprenticed under the artist Cosimo Rosseli, from whom he derived his popular name and whom he assisted in the painting of the Sistine Chapel in 1481.
In the first phase of his career, Piero was influenced by the Netherlandish naturalism of Hugo van der Goes, whose Portinari Triptych (now at the Spedale of Santa Maria Novella in Florence) helped to lead the whole of Florentine painting into new channels. From him, most probably, Cosimo acquired the love of landscape and the intimate knowledge of the growth of flowers and of animal life.
During his lifetime, Cosimo acquired a reputation for eccentricity—a reputation enhanced and exaggerated by later commentators. Reportedly, he was frightened of thunderstorms, and so pyrophobic that he rarely cooked his food; he lived largely on hard-boiled eggs, which he prepared 50 at a time while boiling glue for his artworks. He also resisted any cleaning of his studio, or trimming of the fruit trees of his orchard; he lived, wrote Vasari, "more like a beast than a man."
Vasari gave Piero's date of death as 1521, and this date is still repeated by many sources. However, contemporary documents reveal that he died of plague on April 12, 1522. - wikipedia
Perseus Freeing Andromeda Movement: High Renaissance Collection: Galleria Degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy Dimensions: 26.0 x 59.8 in (66 x 152 cm) Date: 1515 Artist: Piero Di Cosimo
