Poppi (Francesco Morandini)

Italian (Florentine)
Poppi (Francesco Morandini) The Golden Age About 1565 - 1567

Biography

Born 1544
Died 1597
Nationality Italian

Francesco Morandini was known as Poppi from his native town east of Florence. He moved to Florence as a young man where he became a protégé of the writer and patron Vincenzo Borghini and entered the studio of Giorgio Vasari. He was a typical if rather derivative exponent of the late mannerist Florentine style. As an assistant to Vasari he worked on the vast project of decorating the remodelled Palazzo Vecchio for Cosimo I de’ Medici, Duke of Florence and later Grand Duke of Tuscany, and he continued to collaborate with Vasari into the 1570s. But from the mid-1560s Poppi was more strongly influenced by the painterly style of his fellow Vasari pupil Giovanni Battista Naldini. His work sometimes also reflects his interest in the earlier Florentine mannerists Rosso Fiorentino and Jacopo Pontormo. In the early 1570s he participated in the prestigious commission to decorate the private study of Francesco I de’ Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio. The Golden Age in the National Galleries of Scotland was painted for the same patron. Later in his career he painted altarpieces for several Florentine churches which have a progressively more restrained character in line with Counter-Reformation requirements.