ANIMAL LIFE IN ITALIAN PAINTING 



Filippino 

 Lippi, 



i457(?)-i504 



Piero di 

 Cosimo, 

 i462-i52i(?) 



worms, and every other sort of strange animal of similar 

 kind on which he could lay his hand." ^ 



Filippino Lippi has in the National Gallery a 

 Madonna and Child, St. Jerome and St. Do7ninic^ in 

 which St. Jerome's lion is treated with more freedom 

 than usual, and not merely as a symbol. It is crouch- 

 ing down and roaring at a large brown bear, which looks 

 at it over a rock.^ There is also a blue-tit flying to 

 its nest of waiting young ones, and what is apparently 

 a squirrel high up on a ledge. A swan with out- 

 stretched neck flies across the sky. 



Cosimo Rosselli, the contemporary of Filippino, 

 paints the common subject of the quarrelling dog and 

 cat in a Last Supper (Rome, Sistine Chapel), and in 

 the Sermon on the Mount the usual predacious hawk 

 flies overhead. 



Vasari comments on the extraordinary diligence and 

 patience shown in Piero di Cosimo's drawings of animals 

 in a book belonging to Cosimo de' Medici. He evi- 

 dently took a genuine pleasure in painting them. In 

 the National Gallery is a classical myth, the Death of 

 Procris, as interpreted by the Renaissance. The faithful 



^ Vasari, Lives, vol. ii. p. 378. 



^ Mr. P. G. Konody speaks of this as a wild-boar. See Filippino Lippi, 

 p. XV. A woodcut by Domenico Campagnola {c. 15 17) shows a furious fight 

 between the lion and a bear which are locked together standing on their 

 hind legs. The saint watches the combat across a strongly flowing river. 

 See Bernhard Berenson, Critical Notes on Italia7i Paifiters, vol. ii. p. 290. 



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