Word: cosimo
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Scholar's Prince. What called Fra Angelico away from San Domenico was the triumphant return from political exile on Oct. 6, 1434 of Cosimo de' Medici, the wealthiest banker of his day, munificent benefactor and art patron whose scholarly passions and political adroitness made Florence the foremost city of the Renaissance. Cosimo's rule created for Florence an interval of peace and poise in which a man could aspire to make a balanced masterpiece of his life. As the outward expression of this, Cosimo set to work on a program to make Florence the wonder of Europe...
...embellish the city, its churches and palaces he drew on the talents of Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Lippo Lippi, Uccello, Luca della Robbia. The great monument to his ideal, a marriage between humanism and religion, was the San Marco convent, which Cosimo prevailed upon Pope Eugenius IV to transfer from the Sylvetrines to the Dominican Observants. Cosimo ordered his favorite architect Michelozzo to repair the building, richly endowed it with 400 rare manuscripts and classic statues of Venus and Apollo. To do the frescoes, Cosimo called on the great Dominican painter Fra Angelico...
While the old San Marco buildings were being repaired, the Dominicans lived in huts and damp cells. But as the ground floor was readied, Fra Angelico and his assistants went to work, painting a series of Crucifixions in the cloister, the main refectory and the chapter house. For Cosimo's cell, largest in the monastery, where the Medici prince liked to retire for contemplation, Fra Angelico repeated once again the Coming of the Magi at Cosimo's request, "to have this example of Eastern kings laying down their crowns at the manger of Bethlehem always before his eyes...
...grown steadily bigger and richer, and last year it added a strikingly modern, $1,500,000 wing. But for generations the student favorite at the gallery has been a thoughtful, kind-looking lady who clutches a rabbit to her velvet bosom. The painting is attributed to Piero di Cosimo, and beautifully combines Piero's relaxed good cheer with the dressy formalism of his native Florence...
...Renaissance man's splendid sensual joy and lust for life, as expressed by the 16th-Century Italian painter, Piero di Cosimo, in time degenerated into the jaded 19th-Century taste that produced Manet's famed "boy-like courtesan," Olympia...