The Misfortunes of Silenus

Piero di Cosimo was known to be notoriously independent. Rejecting the serene, idealized classical order popularized by his contemporaries like Raphael or Botticelli, he preferred the raw, wild, and strange corners of mythology. "The Misfortunes of Silenus" (c. 1500) is one of Piero's brilliantly unhinged depictions of the wildly eccentric undercurrents of his own psyche and of the High Renaissance. Unlike massive public altarpieces, "The Misfortunes of Silenus" was commissioned as a spalliera, a decorative wood panel set into the wall or furniture of a private bedchamber, for the prominent Florentine statesman Guidantonio Vespucci (a relative of the explorer Amerigo Vespucci) to decorate his family palace. Influenced by Ovid’s Fasti, Piero paints the carnivalesque aftermath of the discovery of honey, at the heart of which is Silenus, the perpetually intoxicated tutor of Bacchus, perched precariously on top of a donkey. His frenzy and greed drives him to plunder a hollow tree trunk, only to be swarmed and aggressively stung by a nest of furious wasps. Rather than treating this mythological figure with noble reverence, Piero paints him with a grotesque, comedic vulnerability, surrounded by satyrs and maenads who mock his agonizing clumsiness. Famously recorded by the biographer Giorgio Vasari as a recluse, Piero di Cosimo was supposedly an eccentric genius who lived a solitary life, ate only boiled eggs, and refused to let his garden be pruned because he believed nature should take its own wild course. This untamed mindscape is vividly reflected in the landscapes of his art which are filled with gnarled, distorted, dead tree trunks that look almost anthropomorphic. Together with its sister panel, "The Discovery of Honey" (housed across the Atlantic in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), the two paintings form the "Vespucci Bacchanals": a visual journey that maps the fragile line between human civilization and feral overindulgence.