Francesco Salviati
1510–1563 · Duchy of Florence · Mannerism
The story
The painter we call Francesco Salviati was born Francesco de' Rossi, in Florence in 1510. The name he goes by came from a patron: around 1531 Cardinal Giovanni Salviati brought the young painter to Rome, and he took the cardinal's surname for the rest of his career.
He became one of the busiest fresco decorators of his time, a Mannerist who filled walls with crowds of elegant figures locked in twisting, artificial poses. He trained partly with Andrea del Sarto, a leading Florentine master, and worked for church and noble patrons across Rome, Florence, Venice and Bologna. His best-known frescoes are in the Sala dell'Udienza of the Palazzo Vecchio, the town hall of Florence, painted in the 1540s for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and casting the ancient Roman hero Camillus as a stand-in for Medici power.
He was a close friend of Giorgio Vasari, the painter and writer whose Lives of the artists is our main source for the era, and the two shared a similar crowded manner. Salviati died in Rome in 1563.
