VANNI Giovan Battista

(Pisa 1599 – Pistoia 1660)

Tuscan painter and engraver, trained in Pisa and Florence respectively at the school of Aurelio Lomi and Cristofano Allori. Later he went to Parma and Venice to study the works of Correggio and Titian.
Filippo Baldinucci (1625-1696) wrote of him “… endowed with a wonderful vivacity of spirits”, thus highlighting his artistic talent. Moreover his works underline the “incomparable beauty of face and person”.
His pictorial work consisted mainly of admirable paintings and frescoes of churches in Florence and other places in Tuscany.
His most important works include the paintings in the Palazzo degli Alberti in Prato and in the Church of San Giovanni dei Fiorentini in Rome, the frescoes of the ‘Sala Vanni’ in the refectory of the Carmine Church in Florence and the wide range of his drawings preserved in the Louvre. Giovan Battista has translated sacred subjects from Veronese, among which the “Wedding of Cana” and above all from Correggio, of whom he reproduced in fifteen plates the frescoes of the dome of the Parma cathedral.
In the month of July 1660 a physical malaise began and, in the midst of very high fevers, led him to death.