Simone Pignoni

Simone Pignoni spent nearly his whole long life inside one Florentine workshop tradition, and it earned him a reputation the city half admired and half frowned at. His last teacher was Francesco Furini, a painter famous for soft, sensuous nudes, and Pignoni took that manner and pushed it further. The biographer Filippo Baldinucci, who knew the Florentine art world of the day, remembered him mainly as the imitator of Furini's licentious inventions, and one of Pignoni's own self-portraits shows him building up a plump, naked woman from a bare skeleton on the easel.

That taste for the erotic stayed with him for decades. Then, late in life and gravely ill, he was persuaded by his confessor to burn the studies he had made of the female form, and he turned to plainly devotional pictures. One of them still hangs in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence, Saint Louis giving a banquet to the poor, painted around 1682 for Count Luigi Guicciardini, of an old Florentine family. Pignoni kept working almost to his death in 1698, long after the fashion for Furini's honeyed nudes had faded.