The Death of Procris

Piero di Cosimo's Death of Procris, painted around 1495 and now in London's National Gallery, is one of the most poetically melancholy mythological paintings of the entire Renaissance. The scene from Ovid's Metamorphoses shows the satyr Silvanus mourning over the dying Procris, accidentally killed by her husband Cephalus's magic javelin, while her faithful dog watches at her side. Piero's extraordinary sympathy for animals — the dog's expression of bewildered grief is among the most psychologically acute in all of painting — and his poetic imagination of a primordial world where creatures and humans share a common vulnerability give this painting a resonance quite unlike any contemporary treatment of Ovidian mythology. The work exemplifies his unique position in Florentine Renaissance art.

The painting reveals skilled handling of tempera medium in the graduated modeling of drapery and flesh tones, with the balanced composition and clear spatial organization typical of established Italian workshop methods.