I’m a big fan of small museums, or picking specific areas of big museums to look at. For example the Pinacoteca of the Vatican Museums is extraordinary, and usually one can contemplate the paintings in peace: Giotto; Melozzo da Forlì; Benozzo Gozzoli; Raphael, a whole room of Raphael!; Bellini; an unfinished Leonardo; Caravaggio.
The late Philippe Daverio (a sort of Franco-Italian Jonathan Meades: eccentric, erudite, acerbic, extremely amusing) whose excellent Rai series Passepartout I watched with great pleasure in the early two thousands, had a splendid line which often springs to mind. He said, “you wouldn’t walk into a library and expect to read all of the books, so why on earth would you visit a gallery and look at all of the paintings?”
In that vein, exhibitions of single paintings are very much my bag, and there is a lovely one at Palazzo Venezia at present. It’s called La Maddalena di Piero di Cosimo: art, history and the lives of women in the Florentine Renaissance. I’ve always been enormously fond of Piero di Cosimo’s painting of Santa Maria Maddalena which usually glows quietly in a corner, often overlooked among the panoply of delights of Palazzo Barberini.
It’s super to see her given a bit of limelight in a show which uses the painting as a prism through which to view the lives of women, and as a study of the decorative arts in the Florentine Renaissance.
The life of Piero di Cosimo spans the late quattrocento and the early cinquecento, a particularly serendipitous ecosystem for the nurturing of his indubitable talents. He was born Pietro di Lorenzo on via della Scala in Florence, not far from where the modern visitor may hop off the train at Santa Maria Novella. His father Lorenzo di Pietro d’Antonio was a goldsmith of modest means; that his son be apprenticed as a painter was a natural path.
Piero (a common diminutive of Pietro) joined the bottega of Cosimo Rosselli in 1480 aged eighteen and the following year Rosselli was called to Rome as part of the group of artists who were to paint the new papal chapel in the Vatican Palace for Pope Sixtus IV.
The first phase of decoration of the Sistine Chapel, a quarter of a century before Michelangelo was brought in to (re)paint the ceiling, was an extraordinary project on which the young Piero would cut his teeth. He would also take the name of his influential master, becoming Piero di Cosimo.
A decade or so after working at the Sistine Chapel—sometime between 1490 and 1495— Piero painted his exquisite, luminous Maddalena for an unknown patron. It is a private work of devotion, with an extraordinary contemporaneity that the exhibition celebrates.
Mary Magdalene wears the deep, rich, sumptuous colours of an elegant Florentine lady, the details of folds and the bow positively tangible as her lustrous hair tumbles, gleaming, over her shoulder.
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