Oil painting on slate, depicting Apollo skinning Marsyas, attributed to Piero di Cosimo (Florence, 1461 circa - ...

Oil painting on slate, depicting Apollo skinning Marsyas, attributed to Piero di Cosimo (Florence, 1461 circa - Florence, 12 April 1522). Cm 29x32. In frame cm 40x42. Thickness mm 10. Gluing in the upper left corner. 

"The painting is attributed to the painter Piero di Lorenzo di Chimenti, known as Piero di Cosimo, a pupil of Cosimo Rosselli, active in Florence and Rome where, between 1481 and '82, worked on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.

Since there are no signed works of his, nor documented attributions, the painter’s catalogue is essentially based on the testimonies of Vasari.

In Florence, between the fifteenth and sixteenth century, after the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent in 1492 and the subsequent expulsion of the Medici, the short and dramatic Republic of Savonarola had caused a recession in the field of art, highlighting a crisis that had been latent for a long time, with sensitive effects on established artists as well as on younger ones, starting with Michelangelo, who fled the city, and Bartolomeo della Porta, who temporarily abandoned painting, joining the Dominican friars.

The subsequent oligarchic government modelled on that of the Venetian Republic and also supported by the pro-medicean circles, favored the resumption of the commission, both public and private.

Therefore artists weren't pushed to move elsewhere anymore, but they were often called back home with the offer of important tasks, to help with their works to reinvigorate the prestige of the city and give honour to the new Republic.

The response of the Florentine workshops to the new situation was not immediate: the fame, as well as the activity of Perugino, had no importance  to the city; other leading artists of the old generation, such as Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, they could no longer express novelty, remaining tied to outdated canons.

Piero di Cosimo is also traditionally linked to this context, despite the vitality and originality of his repertoire and the progressive openness to new instances and Nordic and Leonardeschi.

Characterized by a painting of suffused and rarefied lights and colors, he favored the oil technique on small supports, inspiring and reworking in a personal way the artistic suggestions of Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo and Fra Bartolomeo in particular.

From the Flemish painting, draws instead the refined execution technique, the use of bright colors and the realistic rendering of the details.

The work in question, painted on slate, support used especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth century and mentioned by Vasari (The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects of 1550), can be traced back to the hand of the painter, the restless temperament, that manifests itself from time to time in elegiac, pathetic or grotesque expressions that are manifested in his paintings hosting mythological subjects. It is the case of Tritons and Nereidae, with Satyrs and Ichthyocentaurus (1500-1505 approximately), which we could therefore compare with Apollo skinning Marsyas so as to corroborate the hypothesis of a possible attribution to the Florentine painter."                                  ASORStudio