Francesco Furini
Francesco Furini ( 10 apr. 1603 – 19 August 1646[1]) was an Italian Baroque painter, poet and priest.[2] He was a leading painter in Florence in the second quarter of the 17th century and also worked in Rome. He was noted for both secular and religious subjects in which he used a sensual sfumato style, particularly in the many female nudes.[3]
Biography
He was born in Florence as the son of Filippo di Nicola and Francesca di Lazzaro Rossi.[1] His father was a portrait painter who had trained under Domenico Passignano.[1] Francesco's sister Alessandra also became a painter and another sister, Angelica, was a singer at the court of Cosimo II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany.Script error: No such module "Footnotes".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".
Furini received his initial training from his father. He then may have studied first with Passignano and then with his father's friend Cristofano Allori or in the reverse order first with Allori and then with Passignano. He then studied with Giovanni Biliverti[1] and possibly Matteo Rosselli (whose other pupils include Lorenzo Lippi and Baldassare Franceschini).Script error: No such module "Footnotes".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters". He obtained his father's permission to visit Rome to study its antiquities and Raphael's work. He arrived in November 1619 in Rome where he frequented the workshop of Bartolomeo Manfredi, the leading Caravaggesque painter.[1] He also befriended Giovanni da San Giovanni who came to Rome in mid-1621. The two artists worked together on the fresco of the Chariot of Night, commissioned by Cardinal Enzo Bentivoglio for the Monte Cavallo palace, now Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi. His first dated and signed work is the Crucifixion with the Saints Bartholomew, Magdalen and John the Baptist of 1623 in the Saint Bartholomew Church in Todi, Umbria.[3]
Around 1624 he returned to Florence where he collaborated with Matteo Rosselli. Furini became in 1633 a priest in the parish of Sant'Ansano in Mugello.[3]
He traveled to Rome again in the year before his death in 1646.[3]
Among his pupils are Simone Pignoni[4] and Giovanni Battista Galestruzzi.
Work
He was a painter of biblical, allegorical and mythological set-pieces with a strong use of the sfumato technique. he Furini's work reflects the tension between the Mannerist style of Florence and the new Baroque style.Script error: No such module "Footnotes".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters". In the 1630s his style was similar to that of Guido Reni. An important early work, Hylas and the Nymphs (1630), features six female nudes that attest to the importance Furini placed upon drawing from life.Script error: No such module "Footnotes".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".
Freedberg describes Furini's style as filled with "morbid sensuality". His frequent use of disrobed females is discordant with his excessive religious sentimentality, and his polished stylization and poses are at odds with his aim of expressing highly emotional states. His stylistic choices did not go unnoticed by more puritanical contemporary biographers like Baldinucci. Pignoni also mirrored this style in his works.
One of his masterpieces, and not reflective of the style of his canvases, is the airy fresco in Palazzo Pitti, where on order of Ferdinando II de' Medici, between 1639 and 1642, Furini frescoed two large lunettes depicting the Platonic Academy of Careggi and the Allegory of the Death of Lorenzo the Magnificent. The frescoes can be seen as a response to Pietro da Cortona, who was at work in the palazzo during these years.Script error: No such module "Footnotes".Script error: No such module "Check for unknown parameters".
Legacy
In Robert Browning's series of poems titled Parleyings with certain people of importance in their day, the poet envisions an explanation by Furini that refutes the published assertion by Filippo Baldinucci that (on his deathbed) he had ordered all his nude paintings be destroyed. For Browning, Furini's disrobement of his subjects is emblematic of a courageous search for the hidden truth. Modern research has demonstrated that Furini did not abandon his sensual painting subjects on entering the priesthood.
Furini was rediscovered in the early 20th century by Template:Interlanguage link multi.[5] His scantily documented career was sketched by Elena Toesca (Furini, 1950) and brought into focus with an exhibition of his drawings at the Uffizi, 1972.[6]
References
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- ↑ a b c d e Template:DBI Retrieved 30 June 2025
- ↑ Matteo Marangoni. Furini, Francesco. Enciclopedia Italiana (1932). Retrieved 30 June 2025
- ↑ a b c d Cappelletti, F. (2003). Furini, Francesco. Grove Art Online. Retrieved 30 June 2025
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- ↑ The exhibition catalogue by Giuseppe Cantelli, Disegni di Francesco Furini e del suo ambiente (Florence: Oschki) 1972. Cantelli attributed seventy-two drawings in the Uffizi to his hand. Documents published by Gino Corti in Antichità Viva (Match-April 1971) appeared too late to be assimilated in the exhibition. Soon after, A. Barsanti recovered more biographical detail to flesh out the modest armature of dates in "Una vita inedita del Furini", Paragone 289, (1974), pp. 67–86.
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Sources
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External links
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