A very characteristic work, and the most interesting of those extant, by Piero, called di Cosimo, after his godfather and master, Cosimo Rosselli. Piero's peculiarities are well known to all readers of George Eliot's Romola, where everything told us about him by Vasari in one of his most amusing chapters is carefully worked up. The first impression left by this picture—its quaintness—is precisely typical of the man. He shut himself off from the world and stopped his ears; lived in the untidiest of rooms, and would not have his garden tended, "preferring to see all things wild and savage about him." He took his meals at times and in ways that no other man did, and Romola used to coax him with sweets and hard-boiled eggs. His fondness for quaint landscape ("he would sometimes stand beside a wall," says Vasari, "and image forth the most extraordinary landscapes that ever were") may be seen in this picture; so also may his love of animals, in which, says Vasari, he took "indescribable pleasure." Piero accompanied his master, Cosimo Rosselli, to Rome in 1480, and painted the landscape to that master's "Sermon on the Mount" in the Sixtine Chapel. He painted several altar-pieces, but his true bent was towards mythological subjects and quaintly decorative treatment. Vasari describes in detail a Carnival triumph devised by Piero. This and the adornment of dwelling-rooms and marriage-chests were the forms in which his fantastic originality found the most congenial expression. He was also a good portrait-painter: No. 895 in this gallery has recently been recognised as his work.
The subjects of Piero's pictures were generally mythological. In Romola he paints Tito and Romola as Bacchus and Ariadne; here he shows the death of Procris, the story in which the ancients embodied the folly of jealousy. For Procris being told that Cephalus was unfaithful, straightway believed the report and secretly followed him to the woods, for he was a great hunter. And Cephalus called upon "aura," the Latin for breeze, for Cephalus was hot after the chase: "Sweet air, O come," and echo answered, "Come, sweet air." But Procris, thinking that he was calling after his mistress, turned to see, and as she moved she made a rustling in the leaves, which Cephalus mistook for the motion of some beast of the forest, and let fly his unerring dart, which Procris once had given him.
But Procris lay among the white wind-flowers,
Shot in the throat. From out the little wound
The slow blood drained, as drops in autumn showers
Drip from the leaves upon the sodden ground.
None saw her die but Lelaps, the swift hound,
That watched her dumbly with a wistful fear,
Till at the dawn, the hornèd wood-men found
And bore her gently on a sylvan bier,
To lie beside the sea,—with many an uncouth tear.
Piero's treatment of the theme is, it should be noted, romantic, rather than classical; in which respect his picture is characteristic of the earlier Renaissance. "In creating his Satyr the painter has not had recourse to any antique bas-relief, but has imagined for himself a being half human, half bestial, and yet wholly real; nor has he portrayed in Procris a nymph of Greek form, but a girl of Florence. The strange animals and gaudy flowers introduced into the landscape background further remove the subject from the sphere of classic treatment. Florentine realism and quaint fancy being thus curiously blended, the artistic result may be profitably studied for the light it throws upon the so-called Paganism of the earlier Renaissance. Fancy at that moment was more free than when superior knowledge of antiquity had created a demand for reproductive art, and when the painters thought less of the meaning of the fable for themselves than of its capability of being used as a machine for the display of erudition" (Symonds's Renaissance, iii. 187). Piero seems to have taken his background from Lake Thrasymene.
Piero's poetic fancy in this picture has aroused a responsive echo in the poets of our own day. The lines quoted above are from "The Death of Procris; a version suggested by the so-named picture of Piero di Cosimo in the National Gallery," in Mr. Austin Dobson's Old World Idylls. Another version of the picture may be found in Michael Field's Sight and Song:—
And there she lies half-veiled, half-bare,
Deep in the midst of nature that abides
Inapprehensive she is lying there,
So wan;
The flowers, the silver estuary afar—
These daisies, plantains, all the white and red
Field-blossoms through the leaves and grasses spread;
The water with its pelican,
Its flight of sails and its blue countrysides—
Unto themselves they are;
The dogs sport on the sand,
The herons curve about the reeds
Or one by one descend the air,
While lifelessly she bleeds
From throat and dabbled hand.
Mr. Ruskin also has written a piece around our picture, which he reads with a different eye from "Michael Field,"[170] seeing in it not so much the inapprehensiveness of nature as the pathetic fallacy whereby the moods of nature are made to sympathise with human joy or sorrow:—
"The next best landscape (to Bellini's 'Peter Martyr') in the National Gallery is a Florentine one on the edge of transition to the Greek feeling; and in that the distance is still beautiful, but misty, not clear; the flowers are still beautiful, but, intentionally, of the colour of blood; and in the foreground lies the dead body of Procris, which disturbs the poor painter greatly; and he has expressed his disturbed mind about it in the figure of a poor little brown (nearly black) Faun, or perhaps the god Faunus himself, who is much puzzled by the death of Procris, and stoops over her, thinking it a woful thing to find her pretty body lying there breathless, and all spotted with blood on the breast" (Lectures on Landscape, § 94).
699. AGOSTINO AND NICCOLO DELLA TORRE.
Lorenzo Lotto (Venetian: 1480-1555).