Two dense volumes by Francesca Baldassari reconstruct the corpus of works by the seventeenth-century Florentine painter and draftsman
article by Laura Lombardi published in the Art Newspaper
“A man of melancholy body dress, and who dreams made at night as very true things told,” Francesco de’ Montelatici known as Cecco Bravo, a pupil of Giovanni Bilivert, is one of the most intriguing personalities of seventeenth-century Florence, for his works recognized as “admirable” especially for that “bizarre manner, which from close up indistinct and confused, but from afar finished and distinct with the representation of the truth of painting the lie manifests,” as one of his contemporaries, Giovanni Cinelli, wrote. However, the artist, rediscovered in the twentieth century after a gradual oblivion by Anna Rosa Masetti, Gerhard Ewald, Piero Bigongiari, Anna Barsanti, Carlo Del Bravo, and Giovanni Pagliarulo, had never before been consecrated a work of such exhaustive scope as that of Francesca Baldassari, a scholar of seventeenth-century Florentine painting for nearly forty years. Two dense volumes that analyze his activity as a painter and draughtsman, reconstruct the corpus of works, unravel some knots regarding chronology and clarify the relationship between the artist and some of his contemporaries, Giovanni Bilivert his master, with whom Cecco would compare himself in the beautiful “Angelica e Ruggiero” at the Art Institute of Chicago (former Kress collection), but also Francesco Furini, Felice Ficherelli and Simone Pignoni.
In the essay in the first volume, Baldassari follows Cecco’s stylistic path, from his beginnings in Bilivert’s atelier between the 1620s and 1630s, in which the artist reinterprets in an original way the modes of the greats of the early 16th century (from Andrea del Sarto, to Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino), but also, especially in Pistoia where he worked for the Padri Serviti, the narrative line of Bernardino Poccetti and Giovanni da San Giovanni. The whimsical and bizarre character of Cecco’s beginnings became apparent in 1636, when he was called by Michelangelo Buonarroti the Younger to fresco some of the walls of the library room of his Florentine residence, only to be dismissed, however, by the same patron for the mocking tone, with grotesque accents, adopted in depicting illustrious Florentine mathematicians and scientists (Cecco would in fact be replaced by Domenico Pugliani and Matteo Rosselli). His talents did not escape the Medici, however, as evidenced by the frescoes in the Salzburg Treasure Room and the Salone degli Argenti in the Pitti Palace, where Montelatici painted more elegantly and in sinuous manners close to the manner of Furini, active in the same room…