'Fairytale' Piero di Cosimo on show at the Uffizi

 Florentine Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo is the focus of a major exhibition at the Uffizi Gallery showing until November 27.
    The exhibition brings together numerous works by the original and 'fairytale' artist who worked between the 15th and 16th centuries, including the famed 'A Satyr mourning over a Nymph' from the National Gallery in London.
    In total, 100 works are on show, including masterpieces by Filippino Lippi, Fra' Bartolomeo and Lorenzo di Credi.
    The exhibition, curated by Serena Padovani, Elena Capretti, Anna Forlani Tempesti and Daniela Parenti, reconstructs Piero di Cosimo's artistic development starting from his apprenticeship to Cosimo Rosselli and his decisive encounters with the art of Leonardo da Vinci and the Flemish masters, who inspired him to observe the natural environment with spellbound wonder and incorporate elements into his often religious paintings, where they took on a symbolic meaning.
    Renaissance biographer Giorgio Vasari describes him as a solitary pianter, bordering on the misanthrope, unconventional and eccentric with an untidy appearance.
    Piero di Cosimo shared Leonardo's interest in nature and representation of emotional states, as demonstrated by the intensity of the smiling faces in his Madonna with child and angels on show in the exhibition.
    And, like Leonardo, he was an experimenter; and this, at a time when artists were shifting from use of the traditional egg tempera to oil paints, may explain why several of his works appear damaged: for example, the true aspect of an altarpiece featuring the Mystical marriage of St Catherine and saints - rediscovered in a private collection in Florence - lay hidden beneath subsequent overpainting.
    Like other paintings on show, the work has been specially restored for the occasion.