Baldassare Franceschini

A table of priests in the country on a hot day, and one of them has just announced that he left the tap open on the wine barrel downstairs. The host is already out of his chair. The man who said it is Arlotto Mainardi, a Florentine parish priest of the 1400s whose pranks were still being retold two centuries later, and the painter is Baldassarre Franceschini, known as il Volterrano after Volterra, the hill town where he was born in 1611.

He painted the scene in tempera around 1640 for a Florentine gentleman, Francesco Parrocchiani. Cardinal Giovan Carlo de' Medici, brother of the reigning grand duke, liked it enough to acquire it and to order two more pictures of Arlotto's tricks, which is roughly how the career went from then on. Volterrano became the fresco painter the Medici sent for, working at their villa of La Petraia outside Florence, in the church of the Santissima Annunziata, and in the dome of the Niccolini chapel at Santa Croce.

A whole wing of Palazzo Pitti carries his name, the Quartiere del Volterrano, from the ceilings he painted up there. He died in Florence in January 1690. The Arlotto canvas hangs a floor below, in the Palatine Gallery, in the Sala delle Allegorie, whose ceiling he frescoed in 1658 with the virtues of Grand Duchess Vittoria della Rovere.