PUBLIC FAVORITES (40)

THE Yale Art Gallery was the nation's first college art museum, founded in 1832 by Patriot-Painter John Trumbull to house his own canvases. Since then the gallery has grown steadily bigger and richer, and last year it added a strikingly modern, $1,500,000 wing. But for generations the student favorite at the gallery has been a thoughtful, kind-looking lady who clutches a rabbit to her velvet bosom. The painting is attributed to Piero di Cosimo, and beautifully combines Piero's relaxed good cheer with the dressy formalism of his native Florence.

The rabbit in the picture accords with Piero's deep feeling for nature. Like Rousseau, he dreamed of a golden age when noble savages lived in harmony with the wilderness. The sophisticated Florentines of Piero's day found him increasingly strange. Giorgio Vasari coolly records that after Piero's death in 1521, "it appeared that he had lived the life of a brute rather than a man, as he had kept himself shut up and would not permit anyone to see him work. He would not allow his rooms to be swept, he ate when he felt hungry, and would never suffer the fruit trees of his garden to be pruned or trained ... for he loved to see everything wild, saying that nature ought to be allowed to look after itself."

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