Francesco Furini

He was noted for both secular and religious subjects in which he used a sensual sfumato style, particularly in the many female nudes. • Illustration — Self-Portrait, Uffizi Gallery

Giovanni Battista Galestruzzi is recorded as having studied under Francesco Furini. Places of work recorded in the authority are Florence, Rome and Venice. Residence is recorded at Florence. Work by Francesco Furini is recorded in the collections of Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museo del Prado, Städel Museum, National Gallery of Canada and Groeningemuseum.

He was born in Florence as the son of Filippo di Nicola and Francesca di Lazzaro Rossi. His father was a portrait painter who had trained under Domenico Passignano. 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. • Illustration — Allegory of Painting and Poetry, 1626, Palazzo Pitti 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 and possibly Matteo Rosselli (whose other pupils include Lorenzo Lippi and Baldassare Franceschini). 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. 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. • Illustration — St. Agatha, c. 1635–1645, Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, United States 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. This did not reduce his interest in depicting the female nude as in the Lot and his daughters (1634, Prado). The painting also shows his interest in Antique sculpture as the nude daughter viewed from behind is based on the Medici Venus (Uffizi). He traveled to Rome again in the year before his death in 1646. Among his pupils are Simone Pignoni and Giovanni Battista Galestruzzi.

Furini was a painter of biblical, allegorical and mythological set-pieces with a strong use of the sfumato technique. His work reflects the tension between the Mannerist style of Florence and the new Baroque style. 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. • Illustration — Judith and Holofernes, 1636 Freedberg describes Furini's style as filled with "morbid sensuality". His frequent use of disrobed females is discordant with his excessive religious sentimentality while 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. • Illustration — Head of a Girl Ferdinando II de' Medici commissioned him to paint frescoes in Palazzo Pitti which he completed 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, which are at odds with the style of his canvases. The frescoes can be seen as a response to Pietro da Cortona, who was at work in the palazzo during these years. Simone Pignoni was influenced by Furini's sensual style.