Piero
di Cosimo(b
?Florence, 1461–2; d Florence ?1521).
Italian painter and draughtsman.Tax declarations made by Piero di
Cosimo’s father suggest that the artist was born in either 1461 or 1462.
According to the first, he was eight years old in 1469, while a
catasto (land registry declaration) of 1480 gives his age as 18. A
document of 1457 establishes that his father, Lorenzo di Piero d’Antonio,
was a maker of small tools (succhiellinaio) rather than a
goldsmith, as Vasari claimed. By 1480 Piero appears no longer to have
been living at the family house in the Via della Scala, Florence, but
was an unsalaried apprentice or workshop assistant to Cosimo Rosselli,
from whom he received room and board and eventually took the name of
Piero di Cosimo.