Jacopo Zucchi

Jacopo Zucchi learned his trade as the chief assistant to Giorgio Vasari, the painter, architect and writer who ran the largest decorating projects in Florence. Under Vasari he worked on the vast Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio and on the Studiolo, the tiny private study that Duke Francesco I de' Medici filled with pictures of his collections and interests.

In 1572 Zucchi followed his patron's brother, Cardinal Ferdinando de' Medici, to Rome and became his favourite painter, decorating the cardinal's villa on the Pincian hill above the city. He specialised in small, jewel-like panels of mythological and allegorical subjects, the kind Florentines called quadretti.

Two of them, The Golden Age and The Silver Age, hang in the Uffizi, crowded with pale nude figures in idealised landscapes. He was still working in Rome when he died around 1596.