Perseo liberando a Andrómeda

Piero di Cosimo painted this around 1512, and the timing matters. That year the Medici family returned to Florence after nearly two decades pushed out of the city, and the panel seems to have been made for the wedding chamber of a marriage that tied the Strozzi to the Medici. Tucked into the crowd is the Medici badge, a laurel branch cut back but sprouting fresh green, a private nod to that comeback. The story itself is from Ovid. Perseus swoops down on winged sandals to kill the sea monster and free Andromeda, chained to the rock as a sacrifice. Piero tells it as one continuous scene, and gives the beast a strange scaled body that Vasari singled out for praise. On the right, villagers crowd in to watch, some of them playing odd curved instruments.