Giovanni Antonio Sogliani
1492–1544 · Republic of Florence, Duchy of Florence · Renaissance, Florentine school
The story
For centuries the Dominican friars of San Marco in Florence ate their meals beneath a fresco by Giovanni Antonio Sogliani. Painted in 1536 across the end wall of their refectory, it shows Saint Dominic and his brothers seated at a bare table while angels arrive with bread, and above them a Crucifixion with saints. Sogliani was a natural choice for the house. He had worked in the orbit of Fra Bartolomeo, the convent's own painter-friar, and his calm, balanced figures carried that manner on after Fra Bartolomeo's death in 1517.
His training was famously long. Giorgio Vasari, the painter-biographer, claimed Sogliani spent more than two decades with Lorenzo di Credi, a former pupil of Verrocchio. The figure is exaggerated, though documents place him in Credi's workshop in the 1510s, and in 1531 he served as executor of his master's will.
His commissions reached beyond Florence. In 1521 he painted the Martyrdom of Saint Acacius for the church of San Lorenzo, and in the 1530s he supplied panels for the apse of Pisa Cathedral. His Dispute on the Immaculate Conception, in which Church Fathers debate beneath the Virgin, is now in the Galleria dell'Accademia. He died in Florence in 1544.
