STILL LIFE IN FLORENCE (text page)
While always having been considered by scholars to be a "minor" genre, compared to historical and figure painting, in Florence still life found many interesting situations for an original development. A specific field of application was the inlay of semi-precious stones, which offered solutions of extraordinary suggestion from the late Renaissance up to neo-classicism. Another exclusively Florentine product was that of allegorical "altar pieces" for the members of the Accademia della Crusca. While boasting episodes linked to Spanish naturalism and to the Lombard-Flemish kitchen scenes, the principal representative of which was Jacopo da Empoli, 17th-century Tuscan still life was closely connected with the taste for naturalistic illustration and for the classification of botanical species, promoted by the interests of the court of the Grand Duchy. The production of Bartolomeo Bimbi developed within this trend, whose first exponents were Jacopo Ligozzi, Filippo Napoletano and the miniaturist Giovanna Garzoni. Bimbi's paintings appeared like the staging of a spectacular "theatre of nature" in which discerning botanical reproduction was translated into sumptuously baroque forms. Between the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th century, the international patronage of the Medici family made Florence an appropriate point for the meeting and exchange of experiences among painters of still life and Italian and European painters of animals.