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Lot Essay
Born in Florence, Giovanni Battista Naldini trained in the workshop of Jacopo Pontormo from 1549 to 1556. Naldini’s earliest works confirm the young artist to be the heir to Pontormo’s ideals, though he eventually forged his own highly individual Mannerist style which seamlessly incorporated the ideals of Andrea del Sarto, Agnolo Bronzino and Giorgio Vasari. In 1557, Naldini traveled to Rome, but he returned to Florence in 1562, when Vasari recruited him to work on Francesco I de’ Medici’s studiolo and on the Sala dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio. The following year Naldini became a founding member of the Accademia del Disegno. In the late 1570s, Naldini again traveled briefly to Rome but around 1580 was back in Florence, where he taught a younger generation of artists that included both Francesco Curradi and Domenico Passignano.
The present painting, which has remained in the same family’s possession for more than 150 years, is datable to the 1560s, when Naldini was collaborating closely with Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio. It was in this period that Naldini’s work began to show the marked influence of Vasari’s design sense, formal vocabulary and repertoire of physical types. Naldini, however, imbued his compact figural groups with a heightened sense of expressive freedom by rendering their plastic, sculptural forms in painterly detail. Vasari’s somewhat metallic hues likewise gave way to Naldini’s preference for a smoky palette dominated by cool greens and warm reds and yellows.
The attribution to Naldini was first recognized by Sydney Freedberg, who suggested the painting was a relatively early work (private communication with the owner, 17 July 1979). We are grateful to Professor Louis A. Waldman for independently endorsing the attribution and for dating the painting to the 1560s on the basis of images (private communication, 1 February 2021).
The present painting, which has remained in the same family’s possession for more than 150 years, is datable to the 1560s, when Naldini was collaborating closely with Vasari in the Palazzo Vecchio. It was in this period that Naldini’s work began to show the marked influence of Vasari’s design sense, formal vocabulary and repertoire of physical types. Naldini, however, imbued his compact figural groups with a heightened sense of expressive freedom by rendering their plastic, sculptural forms in painterly detail. Vasari’s somewhat metallic hues likewise gave way to Naldini’s preference for a smoky palette dominated by cool greens and warm reds and yellows.
The attribution to Naldini was first recognized by Sydney Freedberg, who suggested the painting was a relatively early work (private communication with the owner, 17 July 1979). We are grateful to Professor Louis A. Waldman for independently endorsing the attribution and for dating the painting to the 1560s on the basis of images (private communication, 1 February 2021).