Carlo Portelli

In 1584 the Florentine writer Raffaello Borghini, author of a treatise on painting, picked out one altarpiece by Carlo Portelli for complaint. In its foreground sits Eve, entirely naked and seen from behind, and Borghini called her a great naked woman showing all her back parts. Later a painted fur mantle was added to cover her, and it stayed there until a restoration in 2003 took it away.

The picture, dated 1566, was made for the friars of Ognissanti, a Florentine church, and shows the Immaculate Conception. The Virgin above is presented as a new Eve, free of original sin, with the first Eve below her. It now hangs in the Galleria dell'Accademia.

Portelli came to Florence from Loro Ciuffenna, a village in the upper Arno valley, and trained, according to the biographer Giorgio Vasari, with the painter Ridolfo del Ghirlandaio. Prints after Rosso Fiorentino, the restless Mannerist who had gone to work in France, shaped his crowded, eccentric style. He worked on the festive street decorations for the 1565 wedding of Francesco de' Medici, and he stayed a member of the new Accademia del Disegno, the Florentine artists' academy, until his death in 1574.