Sunday, October 20, 2019

Jacopo Chimenti (called Jacopo da Empoli) - 1551-1640

Jacopo da Empoli
Madonna and Child with St John the Baptist
ca. 1575
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Jacopo da Empoli
Three Marys at the Tomb
ca. 1575-80
oil on panel
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas

Jacopo da Empoli
St Francis in Prayer
1599
oil on canvas
Museo Civico, Prato

Jacopo da Empoli
Susanna and the Elders
1600
oil on canvas
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

"Jacopo Chimenti da Empoli had his first schooling under Maso da San Friano, and chose to consider him a link backward to an earlier Sartesque style.  Closer at hand, he found support for his tendencies to react from Maniera in the paintings which Santi [di Tito] published in the mid seventies.  . . .  Jacopo's subsequent development was almost rectilinear, proceeding mainly from the threshold Santi had supplied.  He insisted more than Santi on an objective mode of seeing and on the techniques, of luminous colour and relieving chiaroscuro in particular, to describe it; at the same time he made the effect of his vision and description more legible by simplifying them.  His simplification works not only in description but in whole designs, influenced in this certainly by Santi, and as in Santi also in some way by the intellectual abstractness of Maniera – or of Counter-Maniera; at the same time this tendency is at least as much allied to the models of lucidity and order which both master and pupil studied in the early Cinquecento classical style.  Even when Jacopo insists too heavily on simplifying, making rigid schemata of design, they do not impede but rather work to dignify the existential virtue that he gives his forms.  The conjunction between intellectualizing order and stressed naturalism that he makes in his style towards 1600 (Susanna, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum [directly above]) is peculiarly Florentine: at the end of the sixteenth century it seems that he is reviving, more than an early-sixteenth-century, a Florentine fifteenth-century point of view."

– S.J. Freedberg from Painting in Italy - 1500 to 1600 in the Pelican History of Art series (London, 1971)

Jacopo da Empoli
Maria de' Medici's marriage by proxy to Henry IV of France
1600
oil on canvas
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Jacopo da Empoli
Portrait of a Noblewoman dressed in Mourning
ca. 1600
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Jacopo da Empoli
Portrait of a Woman as St Margaret
1600
oil on canvas
private collection

Jacopo da Empoli
St Julian the Hospitaller
ca. 1610-20
oil on canvas
private collection

Jacopo da Empoli
Calling of Matthew
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
Chiesa di Santa Maria al Pignone, Florence

Jacopo da Empoli
Kitchen Still Life
1624
oil on canvas
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Jacopo da Empoli
Kitchen Still Life
ca. 1625
oil on canvas
Pushkin Museum, Moscow

Jacopo da Empoli
Assumption of the Virgin
before 1640
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Jacopo da Empoli
Supper at Emmaus
before 1640
oil on canvas
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

Jacopo da Empoli
Martyrdom of St Sebastian
before 1640
oil on canvas
Basilica di San Lorenzo, Florence