Artists can be eccentric, but the quirks of the Italian Renaissance master Piero di Cosimo are legendary. He is said to have been terrified of thunderstorms and so pyrophobic that he rarely cooked his food, subsisting mostly on hard-boiled eggs that he prepared 50 at a time while heating glue for his art. He didn’t clean his studio. He didn’t trim the trees in his orchard. Giorgio Vasari, the Renaissance biographer, described Piero as living “more like a beast than a man.”
He was a versatile artist, however. Painting mostly on panel in impeccable detail, he depicted religious subjects as well as mythological scenes. Many of his works remain in the churches for which they were painted in central Italy; others, made for prominent families in Renaissance Florence, are now in the permanent collections of American museums.
