Giovanni Gaetano Gabbiani
1743 · Italian · Baroque
The story
Giovanni Gaetano Gabbiani worked in Florence in the first decades of the 18th century, in the shadow of a more famous relative. He trained under his uncle Anton Domenico Gabbiani, the leading Florentine painter of the late Baroque, and made his name as a portraitist in oil and pastel.
Almost all of his securely known work is a run of portraits of the Medici, the family then in its last generation as rulers of Tuscany. Among the pieces attributed to him at the Uffizi are likenesses of the elderly Grand Duke Cosimo III and members of his court. Little of his life is documented beyond these commissions and the record of his death in Florence in 1743.
