WTI Magazine #45    2014 October, 15
Author : Enrico De Iulis      Translation by:

It has just come to an end a very interesting exhibition in Florence about a versatile artist of a very personal taste: Jacopo Ligozzi. This painter was born in 1547 from an active family of embroiderers in Verona but of Milanese origin, and almost certainly Jacopo's education and apprenticeship took place in his father's studio, who was also a painter and embroiderer of good reputation. The refinement and the taste for every single detail will always be his specific features even when he will change radically the decorative sphere and typology of work, as we will see soon.

Ligozzi's official career starts in 1577 when, after leaving his wife and children in Verona, he moves to Florence called by the grand duke Francesco I. That is the beginning of a very well paid job by the grand ducal purchasers, therefore Jacopo will become a famous and highly esteemed artist all over in Italy for his particular skill: the naturalistic illustration.

Francesco I was very keen on natural history, botany and zoology and Ligozzi's thorough care for details came out astonishing in the mimetic yield of animals plumages reproduced in the zoological plates or the colored flower apparatuses of the botanical plates, observing proportions and anatomies. Ulisse Aldrovandi, the biggest naturalist of the XVI century, appreciated a lot the Veronese painter's work during his journey in Florence in June in 1577.

But his versatility was still to be discovered, and during the years at the service of Francesco I he drew jewelries, furnishings, dresses and funeral ornaments, glass objects, carriages and for works of semiprecious stones as shelves for tarsia tables, a real phenomenon of decorative arts in their field.

This metaphysic and also naturalistic yield is Ligozzi's big stylistic monogram: even when he will devote himself to painting of big canvases he will always be faithful to the perfect reproduction of flowers, nature and animals, even when not exactly of aesthetic tendencies.

In 1587 Francesco I was succeeded by Ferdinando de Medici that did not renew the esteem for Ligozzi, who started a more fervent activity as "traditional" painter till to free himself from contractual ties as court painter, thus starting an independent career in the art market, always thriving in Florence.

He got lots of commissions from Tuscan churches and monasteries, who demanded big-sized pieces or devotional paintings, and from private citizens in which showed up almost gruesome features of a painting always very bound to the objectivity of the same nature, like a never forgotten heritage of his first artistic production.

Ligozzi has always been adept at using colors for the plates, avoiding temperas for the naturalistic illustrations and choosing polychrome pigments of organic or inorganic materials, which were able to reach first-rate beautiful effects and later fixed with bright material as egg white. The result is that also on the occasion of preliminary restoration work for the Florence exhibition, it has been done little to reactivate paintings hues that have been kept perfectly in time.

Towards the first years of the seventeenth century he will undergo some influences in the style of Caravaggio, who, in the lights, sometimes mixed very well the disturbing theme and style of his pieces.

Jacopo Ligozzi was a multifaceted artist who was able to live in the court and showed he could work well also as an independent and with other kinds of art, but with a very personal style and a personal vision between the scientific and the scrupulous imitation of nature.