Piero di Cosimo was born in Florence, Italy in 1461/62. Piero was in some ways the most individual of the major Florentine masters of the late quattrocento. Trained as a workshop assistant for Cosimo Rosselli, from whom he took his name, Piero accompanied Rosselli to Rome and painted the landscape background in Rosselli's fresco of The Sermon on the Mount, commissioned by Pope Sixtus IV for the Sistine Chapel. Piero's early work showed the influence of Leonardo and Filippino Lippi, and then from around 1490 the more bulky forms of Signorelli, and Netherlandish landscapes. According to Vasari, Piero di Cosimo was a peculiar and absent-minded genius who preferred to live and work by himself, eating only the hard-boiled eggs that he prepare...