Vincent Desiderio
(b. 1955)

Vincent Desiderio (born 1955) is an American realist painter. In 2005 he was on the teaching staff at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; he is a senior critic at the New York Academy of Art.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Desiderio
http://www.vincent-desiderio.com/

Cockaigne
1993 - 2003
oil on canvas
284.8 x 389.6 cm
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC.
https://www.si.edu/object/cockaigne:hmsg_04.19

In Vincent Desiderio's ambitious new painting, "Cockaigne," six centuries of Western art lie scattered on the floor like the remains of a really great party. A virtuoso representational painter known for his large-scale, postmodernist allegories, Mr. Desiderio worked on the 13-by-9-foot "Cockaigne" on and off for 10 years. On the pages of the books in the painting, he painstakingly reproduced miniature versions of his favorite works by artists ranging from Masaccio, Vermeer and van Eyck to Matisse, Jasper Johns and Chuck Close.
The title is a reference to Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "Land of Cockaigne" (1559), a moral allegory set in a land of plenty where the houses are tiled with cakes, the fences are made of sausages and the fowl fly roasted and ready to eat.

From an article By MIA FINEMAN