LARCIANI, Giovanni di Lorenzo

Italian painter, active in Florence, known earlier as the Master of the Kress Landscapes. The identity of this master has only recently been established in the mid-1990s as the Florentine Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani. The artist’s oeuvre had been reconstructed around a set of three spalliere panels from the Kress collection and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. It has been suggested that Larciani had been an assistant in Francesco Granacci’s workshop at the beginning of his career.

Larciani was ten years younger than either Granacci or Fra Bartolomeo, two artists with whom he might be confused. Nevertheless, his style is not only recognisable but inventive. His rather nervous drawing, bordering on the bizarre, his vibrant palette of colours and his sensual ‘impasto’ constitute a remarkable contribution to the increasingly exuberant exploratory work led by the Florentine artists in the 1520s after the death of the great Raphael, which seems to herald the work of Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.