Antonio Franchi

Antonio Franchi spent much of his life painting the faces of the Medici. Born in 1638 in Villa Basilica, a hill town in the small republic of Lucca, he was known in Florence all his life as il Lucchese, the man from Lucca. He trained under Baldassare Franceschini, called il Volterrano, a leading Florentine painter of the day, and by the 1670s had settled in the city for good under the patronage of the Strozzi and then the ruling Medici.

In 1686 the Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere, widow of Ferdinando II and the most powerful woman at the Tuscan court, named him her official portrait painter. He supplied the court's likenesses for years, among them seven pictures made for the 1691 wedding of Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici and later portraits of Violante Beatrice, the Bavarian princess who married into the family.

Franchi also thought hard about how painting works. He wrote a treatise on the theory of the art, dealing with colour, light and perspective, that stayed in manuscript through his lifetime and was printed only in 1739, 30 years after he died in Florence in 1709. His late frescoes still survive in the church of San Frediano in Cestello, painted in his sixties around 1700.