His father, Giovanni Ermanno Ligozzi (1572 – 1605), was also a painter, as was his brother Francesco and his cousin Francesco di Mercurio.

Before settling in Florence in 1576, he was an artist for the Hapsburg Court of the Austrian Empire in the city of Vienna.

They show a healthy admiration for nature, a humility in the act of collection, observation and rendering.

On the other hand, Ligozzi was perfectly capable of idealizing and abstracting these forms.

Apparently, he brought examples of his marine drawings with him when he came to Florence and was promptly commissioned more. They were private paintings, produced for a select group of people who would commission them and know their meaning. Both touch and non-touch screens are used within the exhibit to show details in works, technical information, or to allow us to flip through a book, but none of these displays use text, video or audio to give additional information about the works; for example, I would have been interested in learning about the contexts of some of these commissions.

Imagine hanging this on your wall and walking past it in the dark… The head is accompanied by all the usual items to avoid, related to vanitas, in order to be ready for death (jewelry and other trappings of wealth and beauty, the qualities represented on the front-side of the painting).

This couple of paintings is not unique to Ligozzi’s production, as close copies are known of these macabre still-lives.

For, as I mentioned in the opening sentences of this article, when you’re doing natura morta, sooner or later your specimen starts to stink.

From around 1600 until 1620, Ligozzi’s activity as court painter was suspended, and it is in fact in the beginning of the 16th century that he starts to paint dark, religious paintings, large altarpieces that were commissioned from the new patrons of his newly opened private bottega.

Each major section is prefaced by wall text, printed on a simple panel (rather than on the wall itself), in both Italian and English. Born in Verona to a family of artists and craftsmen, Ligozzi became a successful painter, illustrator, designer and miniaturist, active mostly in Florence. His father was the artist Giovanni Ermanno Ligozzi.

After a time in the Habsburg court in Vienna where he displayed drawings of animal and botanical specimens, he was invited to come to Florence, receiving the patronage of the Medici as one of the court artists.

One of the most prolific artists of the 1600s in Florence, Jacopo Ligozzi signed many of his works with the title di minio, miniaturist, suggesting the importance he attached to his small-scale works. It is also common for artists (and people in general) in this period to become more God-fearing with age. He served Francesco I, Ferdinando I, Cosimo II and Ferdinando II, Grand Dukes of Tuscany.

Ligozzi became a specialist painter of plants and animals, which he managed to reproduce in so vivid a fashion they seemed quite almost life like.

He was also a portraitist. There are amusing juxtapositions and facial expressions, like in the showdown between a country mouse and a mole. Thus, although representations of things like allegories of death or of capital sins were themes requested of artists at the time, there does seem to be a particular connection between Ligozzi and these themes.

In these allegorical works, death appears particularly scary and close.

Unfortunately, there is no further explanatory labeling alongside the works in the exhibit, where information is limited to artist name, title of the work in Italian, date, collection and collocation. But none quite as scary as the “natura morta macabra” found on the reverses of a pair of portraits of a young man and a young woman (both in a private collection).

And while most of us have never heard of Ligozzi, he was much appreciated not only in his time but into the 17th century. Ligozzi, as a specialist in beautiful still-lives, had all the skill, but additionally an awareness of the fragility of life, to make him also a painter of death.

Display and Content

Personally, I liked this exhibition, although as usual, it leaves room for improvement.

These texts give some basic historic and contextual information about the theme of the section. Additional to his religious and mythological depictions, he also painted and drew several works of fauna and flora.