Oil painting on slate, depicting Apollo schooI Marsyas, Allegedly by Piero di Cosimo (Florence ...

Oil painting on slate, depicting Apollo schooI Marsyas, Allegedly by Piero di Cosimo (Florence, about 1461 - Florence, April 12, 1522). Cm 29x32. In frame 40x42 cm. Thickness mm 10. Small gluing in the upper left.


The painting is given orally 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, he worked on the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel.


Since no signed his works, nor documented powers, the painter's catalog is based mainly on the testimony of Vasari, who also date news on his eccentric temperament and complex.


In Florence at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 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 the storm also in art, highlighting a long crisis latent, with significant effects on established artists because of the younger ones, beginning by Michelangelo himself, who fled the city, and Bartolomeo della Porta, and temporarily abandoned painting, joining the Dominican friars.


The next oligarchic government modeled on that of the Venetian Republic and backed by filomedicei environments, it promotes recovery of clients, public and private.


So not only the artists are no longer forced to move elsewhere, but they are often called home, with the offer of important positions, to contribute their works to revive the prestige of the city and bring prestige to the new Republic.


The response of the Florentine workshops to the new situation is not immediate: the fame as well as the activities of Perugino no longer apply in the city; other first floor of the older generation artists such as Botticelli and Filippino Lippi, are no longer able to express new, remaining tied to outdated standards.


In this context also it is traditionally traced Piero di Cosimo, despite the vitality and originality of its proposals and the progressive opening new instances and to the Nordic models and leonardeschi.


Featuring a painting suffused with light and color and rarefied, gave priority to the oil technique on smaller, inspired reworking and in a personal way above artistic suggestions by Filippino Lippi, Ghirlandaio, Leonardo and Fra Bartolomeo.


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


The work in question, painted on slate, support especially used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and is mentioned by Vasari (The Lives of 'the most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects of 1550), can be Allegedly by the hand of the painter, dall'irrequieto temperament , which manifests itself from time to time in elegiac expressions, pathetic and grotesque that are revealed in his paintings often host mythological subjects. E 'in the case of the Tritons and Nereids, with Satyrs and ichthyocentaurs (1500-1505 approximately), which could therefore to be compared with that schooI Apollo Marsyas so as to support the hypothesis of a possible allocation to the Florentine painter.


ASORStudio