Renaissance
Francesco Ubertini, called Bacchiacca (1494–1557)
Italian Mannerism painter.
Francesco d'Ubertino Verdi, called il Bacchiacca (1494–1557), was a Florentine painter of the late Renaissance whose art is characteristic of the Florentine Mannerist style. Born into a family of artists — his father was a goldsmith, his elder brother a painter — he trained in the Florentine workshop of Perugino, from whom he kept a lasting taste for balance, clarity, and soft modelling even as he absorbed the elegant distortions of the new maniera. By 1515 he was collaborating with Andrea del Sarto, Jacopo Pontormo, and Francesco Granacci on painted furniture — cassoni and spalliere — for grand Florentine bedrooms, and his work with Pontormo in particular pushed him toward crowded surfaces and the ambiguous, subjective space that defines Mannerism.
Bacchiacca is best known for jewel-like small panels of unexpected colour: intimate portraits, mythologies, and religious narratives crowded with elegant, sometimes elongated figures. He was a habitual and unashamed borrower, mining the woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, the classicizing engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, and the inventions of his own collaborators, then reassembling these motifs into densely worked, brilliantly coloured compositions of his own. Vasari singled out his patience and perfection in small figures and his delight in inventing grotesques teeming with animals and plants.
In 1540 Bacchiacca entered the service of Duke Cosimo I de' Medici and Duchess Eleonora of Toledo, joining a court that included Pontormo, Bronzino, Salviati, and Cellini. There he designed tapestries and, around 1545, decorated a scrittoio (a small private study) in the Palazzo Vecchio with a celebrated profusion of accurately observed birds, animals, fish, and rare plants — a testimony to the duke's interest in botany and natural science, possibly executed under the eye of the court botanist Luca Ghini. He remained active in Florence until his death in 1557.
The words the record keeps using: eclectic, jewel-toned, decorative, inventive, meticulous, elegant, colourful.
At a glance
- Lived 1494–1557
- Origin Italian (Florentine)
- Worked in Florence
- Era Renaissance
- Movements Mannerism
- Mediums Oil on panel
- Techniques Oil glazing, Sfumato
Works in the archive
- Portrait of a Woman and Child / Allegory of Liberality, 1525 (USC Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles (Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Herbert T. Kalmus))
An elegantly dressed woman with a child loosens the strings of a coin purse as a personification of the virtue of Liberality, about to distribute her riches. The female figure is adapted from a celebrated 'divine head'… - Leda and the Swan, 1530 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
A small oil panel of the myth of Leda embraced by Jupiter in the form of a swan, the nude set in a delicate landscape. The Metropolitan Museum dates the panel broadly within Bacchiacca's career (recorded as c.… - The Gathering of Manna, 1540 (National Gallery of Art, Washington (Samuel H. Kress Collection))
The Israelites gather the miraculous manna in the wilderness, the panel crowded with a dense, friezelike throng of small, busy figures. Many of the poses are, in Bacchiacca's habitual way, adapted from other artists'… - Portrait of a Woman with a Book of Music, 1540 (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles)
An unidentified young woman holds an open book of music and wears an elegant, colourful dress of a type at the height of Florentine fashion around 1540. The picture shows Bacchiacca's gift for the intimate portrait:…
What was said
In his Lives, Vasari praised Bacchiacca as a painter who executed small figures to perfection with great patience, who delighted in inventing grotesques, and who around 1545 decorated a scrittoio for Duke Cosimo I de' Medici in the Palazzo Vecchio filled with animals and rare plants.
The J. Paul Getty Museum describes Bacchiacca as a pupil of Perugino who developed an eclectic and highly personal manner, painting small panels of unusual colour and borrowing motifs from the Northern prints of Albrecht Dürer, the engravings of Marcantonio Raimondi, and the Mannerist paintings of his onetime collaborator Pontormo.
The elegantly dressed woman of the Allegory of Liberality, who loosens the strings of a coin purse to distribute her riches, is adapted from a celebrated 'divine head' drawing by Michelangelo (the so-called Zenobia in the Uffizi); Bacchiacca took over the figure and reassigned her allegorical identity to the virtue of Liberality.
What would Francesco make of your idea?
The Artiquity Studio makes a new picture in this hand's manner from a few words or a photograph — grounded in the technique, palette and subjects recorded above, and always credited "after Francesco Ubertini, called Bacchiacca", never passed off as a found work. Open the Studio with Francesco · Keep a life moment the way Francesco would · Pictures made after Francesco