Annotated Bibliography-Answers to "Who is that Person" assignment
MLA


Chilvers , Ian. "Piero di Cosimo." Encyclopedia.com. 2003. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists. 2 Feb 2009 .

Piero di Cosimo lived from approximately 1461 to 1521 and was a Florentine painter. He was adopted by Cosimo Rosselli, hence the name Cosimo. Little is known about Piero di Cosimo because none of his works were signed or dated. The only way that most of his paintings are accredited to him is through the biography that Vasari’s wrote about Piero di Cosimo. Apparently Piero di Cosimo was a very eccentric man who lived off of hard boiled eggs that he boiled along with his glue. He distanced himself from society and had a vast imagination. Many of his paintings contain mythological and fanciful creatures and images such as nymphs and fawns. These paralleled his remarkable ability to create scenes in his mind that were reflected in his paintings. His imagination carried into the world of portraiture, as seen in the depiction of Simonetta Vespucci as Cleopatra, but somehow did not affect his religious paintings.

Harness, Brenda. "Simonetta Vespucci." Fine Art Touch. 2007. 3 Feb 2009 .

“La Bella Simonetta” as she was called after her arrival in Flourance, was considered the most beautiful woman of the time. Botticelli seemed to worship Simonetta Vespucci as she was nearly the only female he featured in his artwork. Even after her untimely death, Botticelli still painted her face and even requested to be buried at her feet. Simonetta Vespucci was the model for the famous The Birth of Venus and there is debate as to whether she was born in Genoa, or Portovenere which is the same town that is believed to be the birth place of the goddess Venus. With a beauty such as Venus’s, Simonetta was married very young at the age of fifteen and died by the age of twenty two from tuberculosis. Within this short amount of time, she had been awarded the title “The Queen of Beauty” at a local jousting tournament and was called “The Unparalleled One” by Botticelli. Simonetta embodied the essence of what Florentines felt was beauty at the time. This perfection by their standards lead to Simonetta Vespucci being one of the most recognizable woman in the world of art.

Schneider, Norbert . " Piero di Cosimo." The Triumph of the City The High Renaissance & Mannerism. 3 Feb 2009 .

This site looked deeper into the symbolism rich painting that some misinterpret. The image of Simonetta Vespucci was a posthumous painting that revered her for her beauty but also had many representations of her early death. The black clouds that lay behind her in the landscape are thought to bring a “gloomy” mood to the painting; maybe it is representing death coming towards the young beauty. The withered tree on the left side of the painting is apparently another symbol for death in the Italian Renaissance. The snake is perhaps the most obvious, and according to this source misconstrued symbol in the portrait. The snake is very often thought to be representative of an asp as a reference to Cleopatra and her suicide. Schneider reveals that Vasari, who came up with this allusion, was not familiar with the symbolism of a snake biting its own tail which represents eternity and “time’s rejuvenating cycle”. "Ianuensis" is inscribed under the portrait of Simonetta, meaning belonging to Janus, the god of the New Year, ever living on in the paintings of great artists even though she is no long of this world.