In The Lives of the Painters, Vasari offers Piero as a preternaturally gloomy man. “As he discoursed,” Vasari says, “he would twist everything to the strangest meanings ever heard.” Why else would an artist paint a wedding picnic dinner ending in chaotic rape and murder. Piero’s sensibility is confounding. The is nothing in the history of picnicking that defies expectations as The Fight Between the Lapiths and Centaurs
Piero’s primary resource is Ovid’s Metamorphoses (XII). Ovid does not mention the wedding guests dining alfresco in a picnic style. But Piero prominently depicts a white embroidered picnic cloth in the center of the composition.
In other details, Piero is faithful to Ovid’s narrative. He situates the feast in the open and not in a cave –a picnic on the grass. John Dryden’s English translation, still among the best, is given the title “The Skirmish between the Centaurs and Lapythites” (1717), and it provides Ovid’s details:
Now brave Perithous, bold Ixion’s son,
The love of fair Hippodame had won.
The cloud-begotten race, half men, half beast,
Invited, came to grace the nuptial feast:
In a cool cave’s recess the treat was made,
Whose entrance, trees with spreading boughs o’er-shade
They state (XII, 210ff)
It’s uncertain if Piero’s shift from cave to open space was meant to suggest what Italians familiarly name a merienda or scampagnata to defy expectations. You expect that a picnic is happy, particularly for a wedding feast, but the contrast of the picnic cloth and brutal visual imagery is intentionally dramatic. Especially dramatic are the Centaurs in the foreground, Hylonome kissing her lover Cyllarus, mortally wounded by a spear, amid bloody chaos.
If Piero meant the battle as a moral metaphor, the narrative suggests a thin separation between virtuous intentions, virtue, and transgressive behavior. Was he illustrating the ravages of drunken behavior, commenting on Florentine immorality under attack by his contemporary Girolamo Savonarola, who he admired?
Close inspection shows a menu that includes roast fowl, roast meat, oysters, grapes, fruits, and wine.
Featured Image: Piero di Cosimo. [aka Piero di Lorenzo] The Fight Between the Lapiths and Centaurs (1500/15 c.), oil on wood. National Gallery, London
See Piero di Cosimo. [aka Piero di Lorenzo] The Fight Between the Lapiths and Centaurs (1500/15 c.), oil on wood. National Gallery, London
http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/piero-di-cosimo-the-fight-between-the-lapiths-and-the-centaurs Vasari. The Lives of the Painters (1550/68), http://members.efn.org/~acd/vite/VasariPierodiCosimo.html; Sharon Fermor. Piero Di Cosimo: Fiction, Invention, and Fantasia. London: Reaktion Books, 1993; Dennis Geronimus. Piero Di Cosimo: Visions Beautiful and Strange. New Haven: Yale University, 2006.