Giovanni Antonio Lappoli

Much of what we know about Giovanni Antonio Lappoli comes from a friend who happened to be the first great historian of art. Lappoli, born in Arezzo in 1492, was a fellow townsman of Giorgio Vasari, who gave him a full chapter in his Lives of the Artists. That biography is the reason his name survived at all.

Lappoli trained first with a local master, then attached himself in Florence to Pontormo, the leading Mannerist of the day, whose elegant, restless figures he tried to follow. His self-portrait, now in the Uffizi, was according to Vasari retouched by Pontormo himself during those apprentice years. Lappoli spent most of his working life back in Arezzo and died there in 1552.