Giovanni da San Giovanni

Giovanni Mannozzi took his working name, Giovanni da San Giovanni, from the small Tuscan town where he was born in 1592. He became the leading fresco painter of Baroque Florence and one of the Medici's favourites, admired for a rare gift: he worked fast, and he worked well, covering walls and vaults with light, quick-flowing figures at a speed that astonished his contemporaries.

His frescoes went up all over the city, a choir of musician angels in the dome of the Ognissanti church, ceiling scenes for the Casa Buonarroti honouring Michelangelo's memory. In his last years the Medici set him to decorate the Sala degli Argenti, a great summer apartment on the ground floor of the Palazzo Pitti, with allegories celebrating the family.

He died in 1636 with that hall still unfinished, and other painters were brought in to complete what he had begun. Later writers reached for a phrase to catch him, calling him a painter of bizarre and capricious humour who worked without rules.