Fact, Fiction, Hearsay: Notes on Vasari's Life of Piero di Cosimo

"I should prefer to consider the artists," Bernard Berenson wrote in 1938, "as discarnate torch-bearers, with no civic existence whatsoever." [1] This famous remark--reflecting a view tacitly shared by many art historians--was made [grave{a}] propos of Berenson's phantomatic "Amico di Sandro," but the writer might just as well have been describing the state of our knowledge about Piero di Cosimo. Few important Renaissance painters are as sparsely documented as Piero di Lorenzo di Piero d'Antonio, sometimes called Piero di Cosimo after his teacher Cosimo Rosselli. [2] Because of this dearth of contemporary evidence, some historians have given excessive weight to Giorgio Vasari's vivid and detailed biography of the artist. Implicit faith in the literal accuracy of Vasari's "most convincing psychological portrait" of Piero, for instance, led Erwin Panofsky to claim that "Piero di Cosimo is better known to us than almost any other artist of his period." [3] More recent scholarship has tended to view the Piero di Cosimo Life with a more critical eye, and in particular to question the familiar antisocial image of Piero, which was long ensconced as one of the "icons" of Renaissance art history. Sharon Fermor has argued that "the element of invention, or at least of exaggeration" appears with particular force in those sections of Vasari's Life that deal with Piero's personality and character. [4] Both she and Patricia Rubin have also discussed the ways in which the portrayal of Piero as a misanthropic and improvident forerunner of artistic bohemians served a wider didactic agenda in terms of the Lives as a whole. Vasari emphasized Piero's supposed eccentricities--the solitude, squalor, and impracticality of his life--as a negative foil for the more "normative" character and behavior of other artists portrayed in the Lives, and as an exemplar of the kind of life he felt artists should avoid. [5] New archival documentation now provides an opportunity to reevaluate some aspects of Vasari's familiar portrait of Piero (see Ap p.). Some of the documents presented here confirm specific details of the Life, while others actually raise doubts. But their primary importance lies in the precious glimpses they afford of Piero di Cosimo as a social being, through his relations with fellow artists--such as Jacopo da Pontormo, Lorenzo di Credi, and Nicola di Giovanni Caprini--and with relatives, neighbors, and religious confraternities.

Our ignorance of the details of Piero's life is illustrated by the fact that scholars have until now been unaware of his last name--or even that he had one. Yet in several of the documents discussed below (App., docs. 1, 3, 4, 5), both Piero and his brother Bastiano are mentioned with the surname Ubaldini (in Latin, "de Ubaldinis"). Significantly, all the extant documents using the surname were written either in the final years of Piero's life or shortly after his death. A posthumous agreement of 1522 concerning Piero's estate even refers to the artist's father, Lorenzo di Piero d'Antonio, with the surname Ubaldini (App., doc. 5), but this is likely to be a retrofit of a usage adopted later. [6] In his adoption of a surname, Piero was following the practice of many contemporary artists and artisans of the period as they began acquiring--or aspiring to--a degree of wealth and social prestige. [7] Surnames were frequently created out of the Latin genitive of some ancestor's given name. [8] "Ubaldini," for inst ance, might identify the bearers as descendants of an ancestor whose given name was Ubaldino. At present, however, Piero's lineage can be traced back only three generations (we know his father's name was Lorenzo di Piero d'Antonio), and no evidence has yet come to light linking the painter with any relative whose given name was Ubaldino. [9]

Vasari's portrait of the aged Piero as eremitic and antisocial has influenced the way scholars have read the few available documents. For example, the earliest document hitherto known for Piero's membership in the painters' confraternity, the Compagnia di S. Luca, is the brotherhood's Registro A, in the Florentine State Archives. Their book records the artist in its membership rolls for 1503 and for 1505. [10] Modern scholars have interpreted the Registro as indicating that Piero did not join the Compagnia di S. Luca until 1503, and Piero's supposedly late entry has even been cited as confirmation of his antisocial nature. [11] However, the 1503-5 membership rolls are among the few fortunate survivors from a once larger archive. Piero's inclusion here does not necessarily mean that he joined at that particular time, and the same is true for other artists in general. In fact, a newly found contract drawn up by the compagnia shows that Piero di Cosimo--called "Pierus Laurentii Pieri" by the document--was alrea dy a member by October 18, 1499, when he was present at a meeting in the hospital of S. Maria Nuova. [12]

Vasari claimed that Piero died in 1521, but a document recently published by Eugenio Casalini showed that "Piero di Cosimo dipintore" was buried by his fellow members of the Compagnia dell'Annunziata, a confraternity that met in the homonymous church, on April 13, 1522. [13] (Vasari's error is only slight, however, since by the Florentine calendar the year 1521 ended less than three weeks earlier, on March 24). But the precise date of Piero's death--as opposed to his burial--as well as the exact time and cause of death are provided by a ricordo, or memorandum, added in the margin of a contract drawn up for Piero by a notary, ser Girolamo Cantoni, less than a month before (App., doc. 3). Though this ricordo is in Italian, unlike the document itself, which is in Latin, the handwriting is the same as that used throughout Ser Girolamo's protocols and thus apparently his own. It reads: "Note that the said Piero died of plague at the tenth hour and on the 12th day of April 1522." It was not previously known that P iero died as a result of the plague that ravaged Florence between 1522 and 1524, causing artists such as Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo to flee to the countryside for safety.