Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Piero di Cosimo (Piero di Lorenzo)
Italian; 15th-century, 16th-century
London, England: The National Gallery
71%
An Allegory of Civilization. c1490. Oil, egg tempera, and mordant gilding on canvas
The allegorical dimension of this picture introduces issues for Piero. Why does Italian painting seem to struggle with this kind of scene while pictures from the North (cf. Bruegel) thrive? It's the tendency towards prioritizing the perfection of discrete representations over that of the picture as a whole. Even given Piero's slightly schematic/cartoonish early Renaissance style, there's far too much poring over each figure that gets in the way of their collective fitness within the scene. See the weird ovoid created by the seven-figure group in the foreground: see how awkwardly the blacksmith's leg needs to project outwards to offset the horizontality of the sleeper beside him. To be more precise, the problem is not that the deliberate modeling of any individual figure stymies the picture's overall unity, but rather that there are overlapping and conflicting unities at play throughout this picture at multiple levels. (TFS, 2025)