Francesco Bacchiacca

Around 1545 Duke Cosimo de' Medici gave the Florentine painter Francesco Bacchiacca an unusual job. In a small mezzanine room of the Palazzo Vecchio, the seat of Florence's government, Bacchiacca painted a studiolo crowded with animals and rare plants, the kind of curiosity cabinet a Renaissance prince liked to show off. Vasari, the painter and biographer, recorded that Bacchiacca delighted in inventing grotteschi, the playful hybrid ornament of beasts and foliage that had been dug out of ancient Roman ruins.

That taste for the strange and decorative ran through his whole career. Born in Florence in 1494 and trained in the studio of Perugino, he later worked beside Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo on painted furniture for a wealthy Florentine bedroom, the chests and wall panels a grand marriage called for. His small cabinet pictures are magpie things, lifting figures freely from Dürer's prints and other northern sources and setting them in bright, jewel-like colour.

He reached his height at the court of Cosimo and Duchess Eleonora of Toledo after their 1539 wedding, kept busy for nearly 17 years and paid to design cartoons for the tapestry workshop the duke had founded in Florence. Bacchiacca died in the city in 1557.