Ludovico Buti

Look up in the first corridor of the Uffizi, in the small rooms once used as the grand-ducal armoury, and the ceilings run with painted grotesques, landscapes and scenes of distant conquest. A good part of that decoration is the work of Ludovico Buti, a Florentine painter now barely known outside specialist catalogues.

Born in Florence around 1560, Buti belonged to the last Mannerist generation and built his career on team commissions rather than solo fame. He is documented in the Accademia del Disegno, the city's painters' academy, from 1582 to 1610, almost the whole span of his working life, and he laboured beside better-remembered contemporaries such as Alessandro Allori and Bernardino Poccetti.

In 1589 Grand Duke Ferdinando I set him to decorate the armoury ceilings and the rooms attached to the new map gallery. He died in Florence after 1611, and most of what survives from his hand belongs to those shared Medici commissions.