Scuola fiorentina dell'inizio del XVII secolo

oil on canvas, framed, some defects

cm 104x84

With inscription on recto: M. Giovannozzo di Francesco Pitti, ambasciador al sommo Pontefice Niccola V, al Re di Napoli, al Duca di Milano et ad altri principi da l’anno 1437 al 1453, gonfalone 1462 The following technical sheet of the work was created by Professor Sandro Bellesi as part of the inventory of the paintings of the Fattoria Franceschini. The work is part of a group of paintings illustrating historical figures belonging to the Pitti family, who lived mainly between the early fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Genealogical series similar to the one in question must have enjoyed, on the basis of what is possible to ascertain at the current state of knowledge, of a certain fortune in the context of Florentine painting during the seventeenth century, as evidenced at the moment above all groups of paintings depicting historical personalities linked to the Frescobaldi, Ginori, Gondi, Guadagni and Rucellai families. Unlike the aforementioned series, however, depicting full-length characters referable to leading artists, the series in question, characterized by men described in profile up to the height of the hips, is conducted by hitherto anonymous painters with limited executive skills and of little inventive imagination. These "limitations", mainly attributable to the smallness of payments, were certainly linked to the destination of the works, created for the furnishing of a country villa, or Villa Pitti in Lastra a Signa, and not for a prestigious Florentine noble palace. Sensitive to the historical portraits of the so-called "Jovian Series" made above all by Cristofano dell'Altissimo for the Medici collections and now preserved in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the paintings in question show different stylistic data in which mostly references seem to converge, as well as the language of Dell'Altissimo, the schools of various masters active between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Tuscany, in particular Santi di Tito, Alessandro Allori and Passignano.