Painters

Allori, Alessandro

1535–1607

Alessandro di Cristofano di Lorenzo del Bronzino Allori (31 May 1535 – 22 September 1607) was one of the most significant painters of late Florentine Mannerism, active across the second half of the sixteenth century and into the early seventeenth. Occasionally nicknamed Il Bronzino after his celebrated master, he is sometimes confused with Agnolo Bronzino himself — a testament to the extraordinary fidelity with which he absorbed and extended his teacher's visual language.

Allori was born in Florence on 31 May 1535, the son of Cristofano di Lorenzo, a swordsmith, and Dianora Sofforom. His father died in 1540, when Alessandro was only five years old. Agnolo Bronzino, a close friend of the family, took the boy under his personal care and became his guardian, mentor, and surrogate father — despite the erroneous tradition, repeated in many sources, that Bronzino was actually his uncle. Alessandro grew up entirely within Bronzino's Florentine workshop, absorbing from childhood the refined aesthetic canons of Mannerism: elongated figures, sharp facial features, enamel-like surface treatment, and a cool, crystalline palette.

His formation was not limited to Bronzino alone. As one of the last heirs of the great Florentine Mannerist tradition, Allori studied with deep attention the work of Andrea del Sarto, Fra Bartolomeo, Leonardo da Vinci, and above all Pontormo. The influence of Michelangelo is equally felt throughout his career, particularly in his treatment of the human body — muscular, monumental, and sculptural in its plasticity.

Allori traveled to Rome, an experience that deepened his engagement with antique sculpture and with Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel, reinforcing his taste for grand narrative compositions and idealized anatomy. His first known major work dates to 1560: an altarpiece depicting the Last Judgment for the Chapel of the Santissima Annunziata in Florence, in which Michelangelo's influence is already clearly visible alongside the cold elegance inherited from Bronzino.

When Michelangelo died in 1564, it was Allori who was entrusted with organizing and designing the decorations for the solemn funeral held in his honor in Florence — a sign of the esteem in which he was held by the city's artistic community. He was also the artist who completed Bronzino's last unfinished fresco in San Lorenzo after his master's death in 1572, an act of filial devotion that closed the circle of his artistic apprenticeship.

Allori's mature style represents a deeply personal synthesis of Bronzinesque elegance with a new psychological subtlety. He reinterprets the conventions of Mannerism with a lyricism that strips away rhetorical emphasis in favor of a quieter, almost melodramatic interiority. His chromatic sensibility, inherited from Bronzino, evolves toward even more vibrant and unusual color combinations.

He excelled across several genres. In religious painting, he produced major altarpieces and fresco cycles for Florentine churches and Medici villas. In portraiture, he demonstrated a remarkable capacity to capture psychological nuance, rendering the inner life of his sitters through precise, penetrating gazes and immaculate surfaces. His mythological works, including the celebrated Susanna and the Elders and Perseus and Andromeda, display a refined sensuality and compositional sophistication that places him among the leading interpreters of classicizing narrative in late sixteenth-century Italy.

Throughout his career Allori was intimately connected to the Medici and their cultural program. He worked extensively for Grand Duke Francesco I and Grand Duke Ferdinando I, receiving commissions for the decoration of Medici residences and participating in the grand decorative enterprises that defined the artistic identity of late Cinquecento Florence. His work appears across the Florentine cityscape and in the collections of the Uffizi Gallery, where his self-portrait is also preserved.

Alessandro Allori died in Florence on 22 September 1607, at the age of 72. His artistic legacy was carried forward directly by his son, Cristofano Allori (1577–1621), who became one of the most admired painters of the early Seicento in Florence, known above all for his masterpiece Judith with the Head of Holofernes — though Cristofano moved away from Mannerism toward a warmer naturalism influenced by the Counter-Reformation. Through master and pupil, father and son, the name Allori thus spans nearly a century of Florentine painting, from the high season of Mannerism to the threshold of the Baroque.

Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli

c. 1450–1526

Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli (c. 1450–1526) was a Florentine painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, active primarily in Florence and the surrounding Tuscan countryside. Though he never attained the celebrity of the greatest Renaissance masters, he occupied a significant and productive role in the artistic life of the city, bridging the devotional traditions of the Quattrocento with a mild sensibility toward classical antiquity.

Bernardo was a cousin of the better-known Cosimo Rosselli, whose career extended to major commissions including the Sistine Chapel. Around 1460, as a young boy of roughly ten years, Bernardo entered the prolific workshop of Neri di Bicci in Florence, where he received his fundamental training alongside his cousin. Neri di Bicci's bottega was among the most active in mid-fifteenth-century Florence, producing a constant stream of altarpieces, devotional panels, and frescoes for a broad clientele — an environment that shaped Bernardo's taste for accessible, traditional religious imagery and efficient workshop practice. The doctoral dissertation published by the University of Rome (Roma Tre) devoted to his Libro di bottega describes the relationship between master and pupil as fundamental to understanding Florentine painting in the second half of the Quattrocento.

By 1473 Bernardo was already working as an independent artist, when he painted a fresco of the Crucifixion (now only fragmentary) at the Abbey of San Cassiano at Montescolari, near Figline Valdarno. The following year, 1474, he executed two fresco lunettes depicting Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel in the refectory of the Abbey of Passignano in the Val di Pesa, demonstrating his early command of narrative fresco cycles.

In 1484, he painted a Madonna della Cintola with Saints for San Piero a Sieve in the Mugello, a work now conserved at the Princeton University Art Museum. This altarpiece is among his most carefully composed surviving works.

Between 1488 and 1490, Bernardo received one of his most prestigious civic commissions: the decoration of the Sala dei Gigli in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, where he painted trompe l'œil architectural elements and lilies on the walls. This participation alongside other Florentine painters in the decoration of the seat of civic power signals that, despite his reputation as a "minor" master, Bernardo was considered a capable and trusted professional by the Florentine authorities.

One of the most remarkable documents connected to Bernardo's career is his account book, the Libro Debitori et Chreditori segnato "A", covering the period from 15 June 1475 to 3 March 1500. This financial ledger, published in full by scholar Margherita Ciampaglia with Edizioni Polistampa in 2024, offers an extraordinary window into the working life of a Florentine painter-decorator of the Renaissance. Through its entries one can reconstruct his clientele, pricing, the types of commissions he accepted — from altarpieces to cassoni (wedding chests) to domestic devotional panels — and his economic position within the city's artistic economy.

Bernardo's pictorial language moves primarily within the orbit of Filippo Lippi, whose compositional models he simplified and popularized for objects of private cult and domestic devotion. His work also shows affinities with minor Florentine masters such as Jacopo del Sellaio. Some scholars have proposed that Bernardo may have made a journey to Rome, on account of certain classicizing tendencies discernible in his works — a taste for ancient and Early Christian art that is not easily explained solely by his Florentine training. This journey, however, remains undocumented.

Bernardo has also been associated by some scholars with the anonymous Maestro della Lunetta di Via Romana, a conventional name given to the author of certain works whose attribution remains debated. This identification, if accepted, would considerably enrich our knowledge of his output.

In 1499 Bernardo was commissioned to modify Bernardo Daddi's fourteenth-century polyptych in the Rucellai chapel of San Pancrazio in Florence — a testament to his continued professional activity and to the trust placed in him to intervene on an important earlier work. Daddi's polyptych is now at the New Orleans Museum of Art, while Bernardo's additions to it are unfortunately lost.

In 1502 he completed a fresco of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian at the Oratorio della Compagnia di San Sebastiano at San Martino a Sveglia, near Fiesole. A panel of Sant'Ivo with Supplicants, a gold-ground tempera work now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence and dated to around 1470–1480, has been attributed to his hand — depicting the patron saint of lawyers seated enthroned, receiving a woman presenting a parchment and a man offering a purse of money.

Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli died in Florence in 1526 at roughly 76 years. His career of over five decades produced dozens of panels of the Virgin and Child for domestic interiors, altarpieces for parish churches in the Florentine contado, fresco cycles, and decorative works for civic spaces. Though he was overshadowed in his own time by more illustrious contemporaries and subsequently overlooked by art historiography, the recent full publication of his Libro di bottega in 2024 has renewed scholarly interest in his figure as a representative voice of the industrious, commercially minded, and deeply religious artistic culture of late fifteenth-century Florence.

Bicci di Lorenzo

1368–1452

Bicci di Lorenzo was one of the most active and representative painters in Florence during the first half of the 15th century, a central figure in that extraordinary dynasty of artisan-painters who, for three generations, kept one of the city's longest-running workshops alive. Son of Lorenzo di Bicci and father of Neri di Bicci, he constitutes the middle link - and perhaps the most productive - in this family chain, perfectly embodying the archetype of the professional Florentine painter: prolific, reliable, technically refined, and capable of consistently meeting the demands of a vast and varied clientele.

He was born in Florence, probably in 1368 - as inferred from a 1446 land registry entry in which he himself states his age as seventy-eight - to Lorenzo di Bicci, an already established painter, and Lucia d'Angelo da Panzano. He married Benedetta Amati, with whom he had three daughters and a son, Neri, destined to carry on the workshop tradition. Confusion with his father was fueled for centuries by Vasari, who in The Life of Lorenzo attributed to him many works that actually belong to Bicci, making it necessary for modern art historians to undertake a long and painstaking process of critical distinction.

Bicci was almost certainly trained by his father Lorenzo, whom Vasari described as "a practical and quick painter" - a capable and swift painter - rooted in the tradition of Andrea Orcagna and Taddeo Gaddi. Upon his father's death, around 1427, Bicci took over the workshop, carrying forward with energy and practicality a craft enterprise that was already well established. In the early years of his independent career, his collaboration with his father is still evident in some joint works, such as the Madonnone tabernacle, the tabernacle in Via Centostelle, and the triptych in Santa Maria Assunta in Stia, in the Casentino region.

Stylistically, Bicci di Lorenzo was a prolific exponent of International Gothic, particularly influenced by Lorenzo Monaco and Gentile da Fabriano, two of the leading figures of that movement in Tuscany. His contact with Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, a highly refined painter from the Marche region, was also decisive; he collaborated with him in 1421-1422 on the decoration of the church of Santa Lucia dei Magnoli in Florence. This openness to the softer, more lyrical currents of International Gothic endowed his painting with a quality of decorative elegance and chromatic luminosity that clearly distinguishes it from his father's more austere style.

Bicci was active precisely during the years when Florence was experiencing the Renaissance revolution of Brunelleschi, Donatello, and Masaccio, yet he deliberately chose not to adhere to the new trends. This stance was not intellectual inertia, but a conscious commercial strategy: there was still a large client base - primarily ecclesiastical, monastic, and provincial - that preferred devotional images that were familiar, iconographically traditional, and stylistically reassuring. For this reason, many of his works are found in towns outside Florence, where the new Renaissance trends were slow to take root, confirming that his workshop had a geographical reach that extended well beyond the city limits.

The intensity of his work is evidenced by a continuous series of documents documenting his Florentine activity almost uninterrupted from 1416 to 1446. Among the most significant projects, from 1429 to 1434 he participated in the fresco decoration of the Compagni Chapel in Santa Trinita, alongside Stefano d'Antonio and Bonaiuto di Giovanni. In 1445, he began the decoration of the choir of Sant'Egidio, which still exists today though it is quite damaged, and during those same years he worked in the same church alongside Domenico Veneziano, thus sharing the space with one of the most original painters of his generation. Also noteworthy is the Bibbiena Polyptych, which attests to his workshop's ties to the Casentino region, the birthplace of Giovanni del Biondo as well.

Bicci di Lorenzo died in 1452, leaving his son Neri in charge of a well-established workshop, with a clearly defined clientele, reputation, and iconographic repertoire. A certain Francesco worked alongside Bicci during the final phase of his career, and the handover to Neri took place with the natural ease typical of the great Florentine family workshops, where the craft was passed down as a legacy of gestures, techniques, and relationships. His artistic legacy is that of a painter who did not aspire to revolutionize the visual language of his time, but who knew how to serve the spiritual and representational needs of an entire society with extraordinary consistency and professionalism.

Botticelli, Sandro

1445–1510

Sandro Botticelli is one of the most famous and beloved painters of the Italian Renaissance, a symbol of that unique era in Florence when art, philosophy, and patronage merged into a synthesis of extraordinary beauty. His real name was Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, and the nickname "Botticelli" likely came from his older brother Giovanni, known as "Botticello" because of his sturdy build - a nickname that, by custom, also came to be applied to the younger painter.

He was born on 1 March 1445, on Via Nuova - now Via del Porcellana, near Piazza Ognissanti - to Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, a leather tanner, and his wife Smeralda. He was the youngest of four brothers, raised in a modest family that nonetheless possessed the dignity of the artisan class. His artistic vocation manifested itself early: his brother Antonio, a goldsmith by trade, likely introduced him to the basics of drawing and working with precious metals, a training that left a lasting mark on his sensitivity for precise outlines and refined detail.

Around 1459, at the age of about fourteen, Botticelli entered as an apprentice in the workshop of Fra Filippo Lippi, the great Florentine painter then engaged in the decoration of the Cathedral of Prato. Filippo Lippi was the master who most influenced his development: from him, Botticelli absorbed the grace of the female figures, the lyricism of expression, a taste for defined outlines, and a warm, luminous sense of color. When Filippo Lippi left for Spoleto in 1466, Botticelli moved to the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, where he deepened his knowledge of sculpture and more rigorous painting, and where his workshop colleagues included the young Leonardo da Vinci.

By 1469, Botticelli was already working from his own home, and in 1470 he officially opened his workshop, receiving his first public commission almost immediately: the allegorical figure of Fortitude for the Tribunal of Commerce, now in the Uffizi. That same year, the fifteen-year-old Filippino Lippi - the illegitimate son of his own master - joined him as an assistant, in a generational interweaving typical of Florence. This moment marked the beginning of a career that would unfold almost entirely within the intellectual and political climate of Lorenzo the Magnificent's Florence, whose rise to power coincided exactly with this period.

His relationship with the Medici family was decisive. It was not so much Lorenzo the Magnificent directly, but rather his cousin Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, who commissioned him in 1477 to create what would become his absolute masterpiece: Primavera, an allegorical painting of enigmatic beauty that art historians still discuss and reinterpret today. This Medici milieu was permeated by the Neoplatonism of Marsilio Ficino and the Platonic Academy, and this philosophy - which reconciled Greek thought with Christianity and identified Beauty with the Good - penetrated deeply into Botticelli's artistic vision, endowing his figures with a quality of ideal perfection and melancholic suspension that makes them unmistakable.

In 1481, Botticelli achieved international acclaim when Pope Sixtus IV summoned him to Rome, along with Domenico Ghirlandaio, Cosimo Rosselli, Luca Signorelli, and others, to decorate the walls of the new Sistine Chapel. There, Botticelli created three large frescoes: The Trials of Moses, The Punishment of Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, and The Temptation of Christ, demonstrating a mastery of large-scale narrative and an ability to handle complex figurative compositions featuring dozens of figures. Upon his return to Florence in 1482, his reputation was firmly established, and commissions multiplied.

His most famous masterpieces were created during this happy period. The Birth of Venus, painted around 1484, is perhaps the most iconic image of the Italian Renaissance: the goddess emerges from the waters on a shell, enveloped in an ethereal grace that seems to negate the physicality of the body while representing it with formal perfection. By around 1482, he had already completed the Madonna del Magnificat, and in this same decade, the magnificent Portrait of a Young Man with a Medal, the Madonnas intended for private Medici devotion, and the narrative panels depicting the Stories of Lucretia and the Stories of Virginia. In 1478, following the Pazzi Conspiracy in which Giuliano de' Medici was assassinated, Botticelli was commissioned to paint the portraits of "the hanged" - the conspirators condemned in absentia - on the walls of the Palazzo della Signoria, a macabre yet significant genre reflecting his privileged position in the eyes of those in power.

Stylistically, Botticelli is a virtually unique case in the Florentine art scene of the fifteenth century. Although he had full mastery of the achievements of Renaissance painting - perspective, anatomy, naturalism - he consciously chose not to make them his dominant language. His distinctive hallmark is linearism: an outline of extraordinary elegance and musicality that envelops the figures like a melody, giving them an almost graphic, precious quality, closer to the art of goldsmithing and drawing than to the grand perspectival painting of a Piero della Francesca or a Mantegna. His female figures - Venus, the Graces, the Madonna - all share the same ideal beauty: golden hair blowing in the wind, long necks, expressions veiled by a pensive melancholy, bodies as light as if gravity barely touched them.

This quest for absolute beauty, beyond time and space, was at once his greatness and his "eccentricity" in the eyes of his contemporaries. Vasari, in his Lives, admired him but also noted Botticelli's gradual marginalization from the dominant currents of Italian painting. Indeed, while Leonardo revolutionized painting with sfumato and Michelangelo revolutionized sculpture with the titanic power of the human body, Botticelli followed an increasingly solitary path, one that was ever more intense and ever less shared.

The final chapter of Botticelli's life was marked by a profound spiritual crisis, the cause of which has traditionally been identified as the influence of the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola, whose fiery preaching dominated Florence from 1490 until his tragic end in 1498. Savonarola denounced the corruption of the Church and the powerful, preached penance, and condemned the pagan and profane culture of the Renaissance without appeal. It is said that Botticelli, like other Florentine artists, threw some of his paintings into the famous "bonfires of the vanities" organized by Savonarola in Piazza della Signoria. Whether this is legend or documented fact, it is certain that Botticelli's style in his later period underwent a radical transformation: the images became harsher, more anguished, less polished, animated by an almost convulsive spiritual tension. The Calumny of Apelles (c. 1495), a pictorial reconstruction of a lost ancient painting described by Lucian of Samosata, is a restless and visionary work. His last dated and signed work is the Mystical Nativity of 1501, housed at the National Gallery in London: a painting of heart-wrenching spiritual intensity, in which Botticelli deliberately returns to an archaic, almost medieval style of figuration, as if he wished to repudiate all the achievements of the Renaissance in the name of a purer and more direct faith.

In the years that followed, Botticelli seems to have practically stopped painting. In 1504 he was still part of the commission tasked with deciding the placement of Michelangelo's David, and in 1505 he was registered with the Compagnia di San Luca. He died on 17 May 1510, almost forgotten by the city that had celebrated him, at a time when Italian painting had already turned toward new horizons. Vasari reported that in his final years he was ill and walked with difficulty, leaning on crutches.

His rediscovery was entirely a product of the nineteenth century: the English Pre-Raphaelites, in particular, saw in him a precursor of their own sensibility - that melancholy, that linearity, that almost medieval purity - and brought him back to the center of critical attention and taste. Today Botticelli is one of the most famous painters in the world, and his masterpieces at the Uffizi in Florence - the Primavera and the Birth of Venus - are among the most visited and reproduced works of art in history, a universal symbol of Florentine Renaissance civilization.

Cresti, Domenico (il Passignano)

1559–1638

Domenico Cresti, universally known as il Passignano from his native village of Passignano sul Trasimeno (today in the municipality of Tavarnelle Val di Pesa, in the Florentine contado), was one of the most significant and long-lived painters of the transition between late Florentine Mannerism and the early Baroque. His career, spanning over six decades, placed him at the intersection of the Tuscan drawing tradition and the luminous, atmospheric colorism of the great Venetian painters — a synthesis that gave his work a distinctive vibrancy unusual in the context of late sixteenth-century Florence.

Born in January 1559, Cresti received his initial training in Florence, entering the workshop of Giovanni Battista Naldini and Girolamo Macchietti, both exponents of the cultura vasariana of late Mannerism, from whom he absorbed the disciplined Tuscan approach to drawing. A turning point came in 1575 with the arrival in Florence of Federico Zuccari, summoned to complete the frescoes begun by Vasari in the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore. All sources agree that the young Cresti assisted Zuccari in this monumental enterprise, which concluded in 1579 — an experience that opened his eyes to the eclectic internationalism of late Roman Mannerism and broadened his pictorial vocabulary well beyond his Florentine starting point.

Following his work with Zuccari, Cresti undertook a decisive journey to Venice, where he immersed himself in the painting of Titian, Tintoretto, Palma il Giovane, and Veronese. This Venetian experience transformed his approach to color: where the reformed Florentine painting of Santi di Tito employed a flat, bright, and uniform tone enclosed within the rigid boundaries of drawing, Cresti grafted onto his solid Tuscan draftsmanship a new intensity of chromatic vibration and a sense of atmospheric depth clearly derived from the Venetian masters. This synthesis — described by the Treccani as "fra colore veneto e disegno toscano" — became his most personal and enduring contribution to the Florentine artistic scene.

After his Venetian sojourn, Cresti returned to Florence and began building a reputation through a series of important commissions. His first major surviving Florentine work is the fresco cycle in the Cappella Salviati in San Marco (c. 1589–91), where his taste for narrative, his inclusion of contemporary portrait-likenesses, and the bold use of nude figures derived from Tintoretto were entirely unprecedented in the local artistic panorama. Between 1593 and 1594 he executed frescoes in the Chapel of San Giovanni Gualberto in Santa Trinità, illustrating scenes from the life of the saint, including a Crucifixion and an Adoration of the Shepherds. In 1594 he also painted for the cathedral of Lucca, extending his reach beyond Florence into Tuscany's other major cultural centers.

Cresti's career reached its international peak during his extended stays in Rome, where he became one of the most sought-after painters of the early seventeenth century. He worked in Santa Maria Maggiore, where he decorated sections of the Sacristy commissioned by Pope Paul V, producing an extensive series of scenes from the Life of the Virgin in the lunettes and ceilings — a demanding enterprise that kept him occupied until December 1610 and forced him to interrupt work on the Cappella Barberini in Sant'Andrea della Valle. His Roman activity also included the Battesimo di Santa Prisca (1599–1600, Church of Santa Prisca) and notable frescoes in St. Peter's Basilica. It was in Rome that Cresti encountered Michelangelo's legacy most directly, and he later immortalized that connection in his celebrated painting Michelangelo che mostra a Pio IV il modellino di San Pietro, now the most famous canvas in the Galleria di Casa Buonarroti in Florence.

His relationship with the Medici was intimate and productive. Grand Duke Ferdinando I entrusted him with the full decoration of the Villa Medicea di Artimino in 1599: Cresti frescoed the loggia, the grand salon, the ducal apartments, and the chapel with allegorical and secular compositions, achieving in these works some of the freshest and most freely conceived compositions of his long career, tinged still with the late Mannerist grace of Zuccari.

Cresti returned definitively to Florence in 1616, where he continued to work with undiminished energy. Among his late commissions are works for the Santissima Annunziata and contributions to the fresco decoration of the ceiling of the Cathedral of Livorno around 1622, where his Assunzione della Vergine demonstrates a grand scenographic effect and illusionistic di sotto in sù foreshortening that recalls the great Venetian ceiling decorations of the late Cinquecento. He remained enrolled in the Accademia del Disegno in Florence through the 1620s, attesting to his continued presence and activity in the city's artistic institutions.

Domenico Cresti il Passignano died in Florence on 17 May 1638, at the remarkable age of seventy-nine. His long career embodied a decisive moment in Italian painting: the transition from the intellectual refinements of Mannerism toward the emotional directness and tonal richness of the emerging Baroque sensibility, achieved not through the Roman path of Caravaggio or the Carracci, but through a distinctly Tusco-Venetian synthesis that remained original and vital throughout his life. His son continued his work in the same tradition, having been trained under his father's supervision as documented by Florentine Accademia records.

Caccini, Giovanni Battista

1556–1613

Giovanni Battista Caccini was one of the leading sculptors and architects of the late Florentine Mannerist period, serving as a bridge between the great sixteenth-century era of Giambologna and the emerging style of the early Baroque. Along with Pietro Tacca and Pietro Francavilla, he is recognized as one of the three leading figures in Florentine sculpture during the transition from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century.

Caccini was born in Rome on 24 October 1556, although some documents from ancient sources—Borghini and Lapini's Diario—lead modern scholars to place his birth date between 1559 and 1562. The family was of Roman origin but soon moved to Florence, where Giovanni Battista obtained Florentine citizenship in 1600. His brother was Giulio Caccini, the famous Roman composer and singer, one of the fathers of opera and Florentine monodic art. In his youth, Giovanni Battista attended the Academy of the Arts of Drawing in Florence, where he was admitted on 18 October 1582, and soon entered the service of the Medici court as a sculptor.

Caccini's first documented work is the tomb of San Giovanni Gualberto in the Abbey of Passignano, dated 1580 — an interesting geographical coincidence, given the connection to the career of the painter Passignano, who had frescoed the refectory of that same abbey just six years earlier. This was followed by statues for the Carnesecchi Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore in Florence, and in 1589 he participated in the temporary decorations for the wedding of Ferdinando I de' Medici to Cristina of Lorraine, creating a stucco statue of Saint Lawrence for the lavish celebratory displays. In the same year, 1589, he was commissioned to create a Saint James the Greater for the Cathedral of Orvieto, completed in 1591 and now housed in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in that city.

In the 1590s, Caccini opened his own workshop, consolidating his position as the leading sculptor for Florentine aristocratic and religious patrons. In 1593, through the architect Giovanni Antonio Dosio, he was commissioned to create four statues for the Certosa di San Martino in Naples — Saint John the Baptist, Saint Bruno, Saint Peter, and Saint Paul — whose creation dragged on until the sculptor's death, so much so that the works had to be completed by the Neapolitan Cosimo Fanzago. The statues are now located in the cloister of the Certosa.

Among his most publicly visible works, dating to 1605, are the two statues of Summer and Autumn on the Ponte a Santa Trinità in Florence, still admired today by passersby as among the most elegant examples of Florentine sculpture from the Grand Ducal era. From around the same period are the decorative statues in the Boboli Gardens — Summer, Autumn, the so-called Prudence, Aesculapius, and Hippolytus — which attest to his intense activity for the Medici residence.

Among the most ambitious projects of his career is the ciborium of the Basilica of Santo Spirito in Florence, completed by the first decade of the seventeenth century with the help of his collaborators G. Silvani, A. Ubaldini, and A. Novelli, of which two of the four parts are directly attributed to Caccini. As an architect, his most enduring and visible work remains the portico of the Santissima Annunziata, completed between 1599 and 1601, which closed off the remaining side of the magnificent square in front of the basilica, bringing to completion an urban planning project begun in the fifteenth century. He is also credited with the Pucci Chapel attached to the same church, although it was completed after his death by Gherardo Silvani.

Caccini's artistic personality is fully rooted in the Florentine late Mannerist culture, of which Giambologna was the foremost exponent. As with the lesser-known figures of that period, the norms of the Council of Trent — with their emphasis on honesty, decorum, and devotional clarity — exerted a profound influence on him, leading him to temper the boldest formal solutions of late Mannerism in favour of greater sobriety and narrative clarity. His style combines the technical refinement of the Florentine marble tradition with a certain devout composure that anticipates the sensibility of early Counter-Reformation art.

Caccini died in Florence in March 1613, leaving some of his final commissions unfinished. His figure, long overshadowed by the imposing legacy of Giambologna, is today reevaluated as one of the fundamental links in the chain that leads from late-sixteenth-century sculpture to the great decorative achievements of seventeenth-century Florentine Baroque, still visible today in the Annunziata, in Boboli, and along the Lungarno.

Giovanni del Biondo

active 1356–1399

Giovanni del Biondo was one of the most prolific painters of the Florentine School in the second half of the 14th century, working in the tradition of Gothic and early-Renaissance religious art. Despite producing a remarkably large body of work, he was entirely overlooked by the early sources - neither Ghiberti nor Vasari mentions him - and his rediscovery is largely a product of modern art-historical scholarship.

Del Biondo's precise date of birth is unknown, but documentary records place his origins in the Casentino, a mountainous valley in eastern Tuscany. In 1356, he was officially granted Florentine citizenship under the name "Iohannes Biondi de Casentino pictor", meaning "Giovanni Biondi, painter from the Casentino." Tax records confirm that he was resident in Florence from 1359 until his death in 1399, when his relatives assumed responsibility for his outstanding tax liabilities. This continuous documented presence in Florence for over four decades testifies to a stable and well-established career in the city.

Giovanni del Biondo almost certainly trained in the workshop of the Cione brothers - Andrea di Cione (known as Orcagna) and Nardo di Cione - two of the dominant figures of mid-14th-century Florentine painting. This formative experience left a lasting imprint on his style. His earliest surviving works are frescoes, and these clearly bear the mark of Giotto's monumental influence, which was still the fundamental reference point for any Florentine painter of the period. As he matured, his panel paintings show the additional influence of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Jacopo di Cione, and Bernardo Daddi, suggesting a broad and attentive absorption of Tuscan Gothic painting in all its regional variants.

Del Biondo's stylistic evolution is particularly interesting and can be traced with reasonable confidence because several of his works are dated. His early compositions are characterized by bright, luminous colors and relatively simple spatial arrangements, with figures that tend toward flatness and lack strong dimensional depth - typical of the Italo-Byzantine Gothic tradition. Over time, his figures acquired greater ornamentation, finer detail in drapery and costume, and a more naturalistic appearance, while their spatial arrangements became increasingly dynamic and spontaneous.

In his later career, del Biondo paid closer attention to foreground and background details, achieving a greater sense of pictorial depth. However, this development came with a paradox: while spatial organization improved, the figures themselves became more rigid and formalized. His idiosyncratic personal style is immediately recognizable through wayward proportions, sharp and spiky facial features, and a powerful decorative sense of design - qualities that, despite their apparent awkwardness, give his work a distinctive visual energy entirely his own.

Like virtually all painters of his era, del Biondo worked primarily in tempera on panel with gold backgrounds, a technique that required exceptional mastery of gilding, punching, and layered paint application. His output was vast, and nearly all of his surviving paintings depict religious subjects, the vast majority originally forming parts of large-scale polyptych altarpieces destined for Florentine churches and private chapels. The sheer volume of his production eventually necessitated the use of studio assistants of varying levels of skill, and this practice is detectable in a noticeable unevenness of quality across works from his later period.

Only two surviving altarpieces bear his signature and date, which is what makes attribution to him particularly challenging and significant. The first is a small panel of the Virgin and Child (1377), now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena. The second is an altarpiece of 1392 for the church of San Francesco in Figline Valdarno, for which he was paid in 1391 and whose central panel with the Virgin and Child survives. A 17th-century source also records a now-lost altarpiece painted for Santa Sofia in Castelfiorentino, bearing the artist's name and the date 1360.

Among his most celebrated surviving works is the large altarpiece of St. John the Baptist and Stories from His Life (c. 1365-1370), now in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, which originally came from the Ginori Chapel in the church of San Lorenzo. This monumental panel (275 x 180 cm) employs the narrative typology common in 13th-century Tuscany, placing the saint at the center surrounded by scenes from his life, with the clear theological and narrative legibility that characterizes del Biondo's best work.

One of the most historically documented commissions of his career is the Saint Catherine of Alexandria and Stories of Her Life, painted for the Bischeri family chapel in Florence Cathedral. Noferi di Giovanni de' Bischeri commissioned the work around 1370; he is depicted kneeling at the feet of the enthroned saint alongside his two sons, Bartolomeo and Giovanni. According to Noferi's will dated 1407, at approximately that time the original panel was enriched with lateral scenes from the saint's life and crowned with figures of the Apostles Bartholomew and John - the patron saints of his two sons - transforming it into a more elaborate devotional and dynastic monument. This work, now preserved in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence, exemplifies the intersection of private patronage, family identity, and religious devotion so characteristic of Trecento Florentine art.

Giovanni del Biondo's complete absence from the early historiographical tradition - despite his extraordinary productivity - remains a scholarly puzzle. His reputation was reconstructed entirely through connoisseurship and archival research in the modern era. Because his style is sufficiently distinctive, a substantial number of works have been confidently attributed to him, and he is now recognized as a crucial figure in understanding the transmission and transformation of the Orcagnesque style in the second half of the 14th century. His work is today represented in major collections including the Uffizi in Florence, the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Kress Collection in the United States.

Ghirlandaio, Domenico

1449–1494

Domenico di Tommaso Bigordi, universally known as Domenico Ghirlandaio, was one of the supreme masters of the Florentine Early Renaissance, celebrated above all for his monumental fresco cycles in which the sacred narratives of Christianity are set against the backdrop of contemporary Florentine society with an unparalleled richness of portraiture, architectural detail, and civic splendor. He belonged to the so-called "third generation" of the Florentine Renaissance, alongside Verrocchio, the Pollaiolo brothers, and Sandro Botticelli.

The name "Ghirlandaio" — meaning garland-maker — derives from his father Tommaso, a goldsmith renowned for inventing the fashionable ghirlande, ornamental garlands in metal that the nobildonne of Florence wore as hair adornments. Domenico was born in Florence on 2 June 1449, the eldest of five children. As a boy he spent hours in his father's goldsmith workshop drawing portraits of passersby — an anecdote that reveals from the outset his exceptional gift as a likeness-maker.

Ghirlandaio received his formal artistic training first in his father's goldsmith shop, where he developed a minute precision of line, and subsequently in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio, one of the most influential artistic educators of the Quattrocento. His earliest documented works are the frescoes of the Pieve di Cercina (1471–72), painted in the Florentine hinterland, which already display a confident mastery of narrative and spatial organization. In 1475 he decorated the Chapel of Santa Fina in the Collegiata of San Gimignano with scenes from the life of the local saint — a cycle that established his reputation beyond Florence and confirmed his gift for integrating figures within luminous, architecturally articulated spaces.

Ghirlandaio traveled to Rome on two occasions. The second and most momentous, in 1481, brought him to the Sistine Chapel, where Pope Sixtus IV had summoned the leading painters of Florence and Umbria to decorate the lateral walls. Alongside Botticelli, Perugino, Cosimo Rosselli, and Luca Signorelli, Ghirlandaio painted the celebrated scene of the Vocation of the First Apostles — a large narrative fresco that demonstrated his ability to compose monumental multi-figure scenes with clarity, dignity, and a naturalistic treatment of physiognomy entirely in keeping with the humanist culture of Lorenzo de' Medici's Florence.

Back in Florence, between approximately 1482 and 1485, Ghirlandaio executed the frescoes of the Cappella Sassetti in Santa Trinità, commissioned by Francesco Sassetti, a senior agent of the Medici bank. The cycle illustrates Scenes from the Life of Saint Francis and is one of the most celebrated documents of Florentine patrician culture of the Quattrocento: the figures of Lorenzo de' Medici and his sons descend a staircase to meet Sassetti himself in a scene set unmistakably in the Piazza della Signoria, with the Loggia dei Lanzi visible in the background. The Adoration of the Shepherds on the altar wall — in which Ghirlandaio portrays himself among the shepherds — is considered one of the most refined devotional compositions of the entire century, uniting Flemish precision of detail with the grandeur of classical antiquity.

The crowning achievement of Ghirlandaio's career was the fresco cycle commissioned by Giovanni Tornabuoni, another Medici banker, for the choir of Santa Maria Novella in Florence. The contract was signed on 1 September 1485, and the work, executed with the full resources of his large workshop, was completed in 1490. The cycle represents Scenes from the Life of the Virgin on the left wall and Scenes from the Life of Saint John the Baptist on the right — the patron saint of Florence — and constitutes the most complete surviving document of Florentine high society in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

The Tornabuoni women appear as the protagonists of sacred scenes dressed in the finest contemporary fashion; the portraits of Marsilio Ficino, Cristoforo Landino, Angelo Poliziano, and other luminaries of the Neoplatonic Academy appear in the famous detail of the Zacharias in the Temple. These frescoes operate simultaneously as sacred history and as a visual chronicle of an entire civilization at the height of its refinement.

Beyond his fresco cycles, Ghirlandaio was among the most gifted portrait painters of the Italian Quattrocento. His Old Man and His Grandson (c. 1490, Musée du Louvre) — depicting an elderly man with a disfigured nose (rhinophyma) gazing with extraordinary tenderness at a small boy — stands as one of the most psychologically penetrating and emotionally direct portraits of the entire Renaissance, remarkable for its refusal to idealize the human face. His Visitation (1491), painted for the Tornabuoni chapel and now in the Uffizi, displays a similarly luminous quality in the treatment of figures within a serene architectural space.

One of the most significant facts in the history of Western art is that in 1488 the thirteen-year-old Michelangelo Buonarroti entered Ghirlandaio's workshop and trained there for approximately two years. The young Michelangelo assisted in the preparation of the Tornabuoni frescoes, absorbing the techniques of large-scale fresco painting — the very foundation upon which he would later build the Sistine ceiling. Ghirlandaio's bottega was also one of the most productive and efficiently organized in Florence: his brothers Davide and Benedetto and his brother-in-law Sebastiano Mainardi were permanent collaborators, giving the workshop a production capacity and organizational sophistication unmatched among his contemporaries.

Domenico Ghirlandaio died in Florence on 11 January 1494, at only forty-five years of age, carried off by a pestilential fever while he was working on a series of mosaics for the Cathedral of Siena. He was buried in Santa Maria Novella — the very church that contains his greatest masterpiece. His brief but extraordinarily prolific career left an indelible mark on Florentine painting, and his legacy was carried forward by his son Ridolfo Ghirlandaio (1483–1561), who continued painting in the family tradition well into the sixteenth century. Through Michelangelo, the influence of his workshop extended far beyond the confines of Florence to shape the entire subsequent history of European art.

Jacopo di Cione (il Robiccia)

c. 1325–1399/1400

Jacopo di Cione, known as "il Robiccia," was one of the longest-lived and most prolific painters of fourteenth-century Florence, a key figure in the transmission and consolidation of the Orcagna style in the latter part of the century. He was the youngest of three painter brothers: Andrea di Cione, known as l'Orcagna, and Nardo di Cione, joined by their brother Matteo, a sculptor. Together, the four Cione brothers represent one of the most extraordinary family phenomena in the history of Florentine art.

Jacopo was born in Florence, in the district of Santa Maria Novella, probably in the third decade of the fourteenth century - the conventional date of 1325 is to be understood as an approximation. He trained artistically alongside his brothers, attending the workshops of Andrea Pisano and Giotto di Bondone, the two masters who at that time defined the standards of Florentine painting and sculpture. This dual influence - Giotto's compositional solidity and Pisano's technical precision - is evident throughout his body of work, which is distinguished by a synthesis of figurative monumentality and decorative refinement. The first documented mention of Jacopo dates to 21 May 1365, when he is named in the will of his brother Nardo di Cione as an heir alongside his other brothers, a sign that his career was already well established.

Between 1366 and 1368, Jacopo worked independently for the first time, without his brothers' collaboration, creating the frescoes in the Palazzo dell'Arte dei Giudici e Notai in Florence. For the same guild, he also painted a large altarpiece depicting a Crucifixion, now in the National Gallery in London, a work of remarkable quality that attests to his full artistic maturity. This brief but significant period coincided with the deaths of his two older brothers: Nardo died in 1366 and Andrea in 1368, leaving Jacopo with the burden and honor of carrying on their legacy.

Upon Andrea's death in 1368, numerous unfinished commissions fell to Jacopo. The most important was the completion of the large panel depicting Saint Matthew and Stories from His Life for Orsanmichele, commissioned by the consuls of the Guild of Money Changers - a work now in the Uffizi that Andrea had conceived and begun, but which illness had prevented him from completing. On 12 January 1369, Jacopo was enrolled in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries, the guild that brought together Florentine painters, marking his official professional independence; he later became its consul in 1384, 1387, and 1392, a testament to the prestige he had acquired over time.

The most ambitious and well-documented work of his independent career is the large Coronation of the Virgin, painted in 1372-1373 for the Florentine Mint on commission from the guild; today it is housed in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, in the room known as the "Camera dell'Orcagna." The painting was created in collaboration with the painter Niccolò di Pietro Gerini - a partnership that would be repeated on several occasions - and with another painter named Simone. This work underwent restoration in 2011 and has been restored to its original magnificence: a hierarchically ordered composition, with gilded backgrounds and solemn figures that directly echo Orcagna's model in the Strozzi Polyptych.

Among the most significant collaborations of his career was his repeated partnership with Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, with whom he painted the high altar of the church of San Pier Maggiore in Florence, commissioned by the Albizzi family - a polyptych of twelve main panels now scattered among the National Gallery in London and other collections. Between 1378 and 1380, Jacopo also worked as a technical supervisor on the construction site of Santa Maria del Fiore, alongside his brother Matteo, taking over after the latter's death in the selection of marbles for the cathedral's exterior cladding. This technical-administrative role attests to a professional profile that went far beyond the simple role of a workshop painter.

Stylistically, Jacopo remained faithful throughout his life to the Orcagna tradition: frontal and solemn figures, exquisitely precious gold backgrounds, hierarchically ordered compositions, and a palette that is austere yet luminous. Compared to Andrea, his style tends toward a certain decorative softness, less severe and more accessible, which made him a painter highly appreciated by Florentine guild and religious patrons in the 1370s and 1380s. The difficulty of distinguishing his hand from that of his collaborators - in particular Niccolò di Pietro Gerini and the so-called Master of the Ashmolean Museum Predella - has long complicated the work of attribution for art historians.

Jacopo di Cione died around 1399-1400, bringing to a close a career spanning over thirty years of full professional autonomy. With his death ended the story of a family that had dominated the Florentine art scene for more than half a century, from the great era of Andrea Orcagna to the threshold of the new fifteenth century. His legacy was not so much a revolutionary style as the skillful and faithful stewardship of a great tradition: Jacopo was the guardian of the Orcagna legacy, the conduit through which that solemn and hieratic vision of the sacred was transmitted to the painters of the next generation, among whom Giovanni del Biondo himself had frequent exchanges and collaborations with him.

Neri di Bicci

1419–1491

Neri di Bicci was the last representative of one of the longest-lasting and most prolific painting dynasties in Florence between the 14th and 15th centuries. The grandson of Lorenzo di Bicci and son of Bicci di Lorenzo, he embodied the pinnacle of a family workshop tradition that had been passed down through three consecutive generations at the heart of Tuscan Gothic art. Vasari, though he mistakenly confused the generations, recognized the significance of a strong stylistic lineage that linked the three painters as an unbroken chain of artistic taste and craftsmanship.

Neri was almost certainly trained in the workshop of his father, Bicci di Lorenzo, who in turn had inherited the business from his grandfather, Lorenzo. A document dated June 7, 1438, attests to his presence alongside his father as a witness in a legal dispute, and as early as December 30 of the same year, he received payment for an altarpiece commissioned from Bicci by Donato Barbadori for the family chapel, a sign of his early operational independence. Upon his father's death in 1452, Neri assumed full management of the workshop, continuing an artisanal and artistic enterprise that by then had roots stretching back nearly a century.

The most extraordinary contribution that Neri di Bicci made to art history is not merely pictorial, but documentary. Between 1453 and 1475, he kept a detailed workshop diary known as the Ricordanze, written in his own hand, in which he recorded commissions, payments, materials, collaborators, and patrons. This document is a source of inestimable historiographical value, as it allows for a rebalancing of the artist's image compared to what might be inferred from the surviving works alone: the diary reveals that in addition to altarpieces, his workshop produced altar frontals, images for domestic devotion, chests, and caskets, and that he also engaged in the restoration and modernization of pre-existing works. No other painter of the Italian fifteenth century left such systematic and continuous workshop documentation.

Stylistically, Neri di Bicci is generally considered a second-rate painter compared to the great innovators of his generation, but this assessment risks obscuring his true complexity. His deliberately retro taste, rooted in the late-Gothic Florentine tradition, was not naivety but a conscious strategic choice: it perfectly met the needs of ecclesiastical patrons, especially those from provincial and monastic circles, who sought devotionally effective and iconographically reassuring images. At the same time, Neri was not impervious to innovation: his high-ranking clientele appreciated his ability to combine fidelity to tradition with a selective openness to the influences of Beato Angelico, Filippo Lippi, and Andrea del Castagno.

One of his most recognizable characteristics is his use of consistently vivid colors, which lend his works a precious luminosity and an immediate visual impact. His figures tend toward devotional gentleness rather than dramatic monumentality, and his gilded backgrounds and sumptuously decorated garments reflect a taste still deeply rooted in the tradition of International Gothic.

The geographical distribution of his works is remarkable: his paintings can still be found today in numerous original locations in churches and religious institutions throughout Tuscany and beyond. Among the iconic sites in Florence that housed his works were the Duomo, the Santissima Annunziata, Ognissanti, and Palazzo Vecchio.

Among his most significant altarpieces are the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Four Saints (1452) and the Madonna Giving the Belt to Saint Thomas (1470-1475), both housed in the Diocesan Museum of San Miniato. A splendid Crucifixion dating from around 1460, now in Castiglione Olona in Lombardy, is considered one of the pinnacles of his work.

Neri di Bicci perfectly embodies the role of the artisan painter of the Italian Renaissance: not a solitary genius who revolutionizes visual language, but a capable, reliable, and versatile professional who consistently meets the religious and devotional demands of an entire society. His workshop represents a model of artisanal organization that art historians today view as essential for understanding how painting was produced, circulated, and consumed in 15th-century Florence. The Ricordanze remain his most unique and precious legacy: an open window onto the daily life of the Renaissance workshop, unparalleled in its concreteness and human intimacy.

Nasini, Giuseppe Nicola

1657–1736

Giuseppe Nicola Nasini was one of the most prolific and versatile Baroque painters in Tuscany, moving with ease between Siena, Florence, Rome, and the major Italian and European courts throughout an extraordinarily long and fruitful career. His work spans frescoes, easel painting, and the decoration of ecclesiastical and palatial interiors, demonstrating an ability to adapt to diverse patrons — Medici, papal, and imperial — that places him among the leading figures of Italian figurative art in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

He was born in Castel del Piano, in the Grosseto region of Amiata, on 25 January 1657, to Francesco Nasini and Vittoria Bassi. His family was already deeply immersed in the world of the arts: his brother Antonio Nasini was also a painter, and the two collaborated on several occasions throughout their lives.

Between 1681 and 1688, Giuseppe Nicola was a student at the Grand Ducal Academy of Arts in Rome, funded by the Medici family and directed between 1673 and 1686 by the great Ciro Ferri, one of Pietro da Cortona's most distinguished pupils. It was in this context that Nasini was trained in the great decorative tradition of the Roman Baroque, absorbing the principles of monumental composition, perspectival illusionism, and grand décor — both sacred and secular. Even before the conclusion of this academic training, in 1679 and 1680, he had received an important commission from Agostino Chigi, for whom he executed thirteen small portraits on copper depicting the nobleman's children — copies after Jacob Ferdinand Voet and Alessandro Mattia da Farnese — as well as the decoration of boxes in the Roman theaters at Piazza Capranica and at the Pace. These works already attest to his ability to navigate Roman aristocratic circles.

In 1685 Nasini returned to Siena, urged by his brother Antonio, who was engaged in the restoration of the fresco decoration of the Camollia portico. Between 1686 and 1688 he moved to Venice, where he deepened his study of the great masters of Venetian colorism — a fundamental step in his stylistic maturation. In October 1689, after passing through Vicenza, Verona, Padua, Mantua, Parma, Reggio, Modena, and Bologna — always tirelessly engaged in copying paintings — he moved permanently to Florence.

In Florence, Nasini attained a position of extraordinary prestige: he was appointed by the Grand Duke as chamberlain and superintendent of the workshops of the Medici galleries, and in 1690 he was elected architect of the gallery and admitted to the Compagnia di San Nicolò at the Carmine. In the same year he was commissioned to paint four monumental canvases depicting the Last Judgments — Death, Judgment, Hell, Paradise — intended to decorate what is now the Hall of the Iliad in the Pitti Palace, in collaboration with Giovanni Battista Foggini for the ornamentation; completed in 1694, these works are now lost. In 1695 he painted several frescoes in the Villa Medicea della Petraia, and between 1696 and 1699 he executed the decoration of the ceiling of the Uffizi Gallery, in collaboration with Giuseppe Tonelli for the quadrature and Bartolomeo Bimbi for the still lifes — one of the most prominent decorative undertakings in the entire Florentine artistic landscape of the late seventeenth century. Also in 1695, Cosimo III de' Medici commissioned him to create five works for the Sacro Convento di Assisi as a personal gift, including the Vision of Francis to Whom the Virgin Offers the Infant Jesus.

In 1708, after creating paintings for Franz Lothar von Schönborn, Archbishop-Elector of Mainz — including a Death of Lucretia, a Suicide of Cato, and a Diana and Endymion now at Pommersfelden Castle — he received from Emperor Joseph I a diploma of nobility, the crowning achievement of his international prestige. In that same year, in Pistoia, he painted the frescoes in the Cellesi Chapel in San Domenico; in 1709 the Coronation of the Virgin and Saints in the dome of San Giuseppe; and in 1710 the Saint Agatha in Glory in the town hall.

His most important Roman contribution during his mature years was the fresco in the Great Hall of the Papal Chancellery, opened to the public in 1719. In the same year he participated in the prestigious decoration of the Basilica of St. John Lateran with the Prophet Amos, joining the cycle of twelve prophets frescoed in the lateral niches; in 1722, together with the other artists of the cycle, he received a gold and a silver medal from Pope Innocent XIII.

Having returned permanently to Siena, Nasini continued to work with remarkable energy until his final years. In 1729 he painted canvases depicting the Nativity of the Virgin, the Visitation, and the Flight into Egypt for the Chapel of the Madonna in the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala. In 1734 he signed the contract for the frescoes depicting the Stories of the Virgin in the Certosa di Maggiano near Siena, intended to complete the decoration left unfinished by Bartolomeo Cesi.

Nasini died in Siena on 3 July 1736, at the age of seventy-nine, after a career spanning more than half a century of uninterrupted activity and leaving works in Tuscany, Lazio, Umbria, Emilia, and Germany. Long neglected in twentieth-century art history in favour of the great figures of the Roman and Bolognese Baroque, he is today recognized as one of the most representative voices of the Tuscan decorative Baroque, capable of blending the compositional solidity of the Cortona tradition with the chromatic luminosity he had absorbed in Venice.