Giovanni Battista Naldini
1537–1591 · Duchy of Florence, Grand Duchy of Tuscany · Mannerism
The story
As a boy of about twelve, Naldini went to work in the studio of Pontormo, one of the strangest and most inward of the Florentine Mannerists. When that apprenticeship ended he attached himself to Giorgio Vasari, the painter and biographer then running the Medici's vast decorating projects, and so absorbed two opposite temperaments at once.
His best-known works are two crowded little pictures for the Studiolo of Francesco I de' Medici, the windowless jewel of a study hidden inside the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. Naldini painted an Allegory of Dreams and a scene of men gathering ambergris, the waxy substance washed from whales and prized for perfume, both fitting the room's theme of nature turned into art and treasure.
In 1563 he was among the founders of the Accademia del Disegno, the first formal drawing academy in Europe, and he stayed involved with it for the rest of his life.
