Jacopo da Empoli

Jacopo da Empoli, also known as Jacopo Chimenti(Florence, April 30, 1551 – Florence, September 30, 1640) was an Italian Florentine Reformist painter.

Born in Florence as Jacopo Chimenti, he worked mostly in his native city. He apprenticed under Maso da San Friano.

He was trained at the Maso da San Friano shop in Florence, his paintings are inspired by the first masters of the sixteenth century, looking at the painting of the saints of Tito, then a popular and devoted art, both classical and attentive to the natural truths . Sometimes a trail of the Caravaggio region appeared, manifested by the luminary research.

Formed in the studio of Maso da San Friano in Florence, Jacopo Chimenti produced a painting directly inspired by the masters of Cinquecento. He held his workshop, with Benedetto da Majano at the Palazzo Pasqui in Florence, via dei Servi.

Like his contemporary in Counter-Maniera, Santi di Tito, he moved into a style often more crisp, less contorted, and less crowded than mannerist predecessors like Vasari. He collaborated with Alessandro Tiarini in some projects. His brother, Domenico Chimenti born in Empoli, was also a painter. Among his pupils were Felice Ficherelli, Giovanni Battista Brazzè, Giovanni Battista Vanni, and Virgilio Zaballi.

In the years 1610-1620, he showed a certain interest in the pictorial riches of the followers of Cigoli, as in Saint Eloi, Goldsmith of the Uffizi. Finally, working in a thematic often shunned by Florentine painters, after the 1620s he completed a series of exceptional still-life paintings.

It then approaches the anti-Maanoist reformism of Santi di Tito, as in the Suzanne at the Bath of Vienna and the Annunciation of the Holy Trinity.

A painting by Jacopo da Empoli is in the Shrine of Our Lady of the Three Rivers in Mugello, near Ronta. He made his lab in Florence at Pasqui Palace in Via dei Servi, as he remembers a plaque today.

Fascinated by experiments on the light of the Tuscan caravaggio, he was also an excellent painter of still lifes and an extraordinary draftsman “after nature”. Recently, Alexander Brown and John Brown found two drawings at the Wicar Museum in Lille, distinguishing visions of the same subject for each of the eyes of an observer, executed by Jacopo Chimenti, anticipating the stereoscopy that will really take off Than with the discovery of photography in the nineteenth century.

Works:
Madonna in Glory with Saint Luke and Saint Ives (1579) – Louvre, Paris
Sacrifice of Isaac (1590s) – Oil on copper, 32 x 25 cm, Uffizi, Florence
Susanna and the Elders (1600) – Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna
Sant’Eligio (1614) – Uffizi, Florence
Carlo Borromeo and the Rospigliosi Family (1613) – Church of San Domenico, Pistoia
Still Life with Games (1620s) – Oil on canvas, 114 x 152 cm, Private collection
Judgement of Midas (1624) – Pistoia
Saint Ives, Protector of Widows and Orphans – Palatine Gallery, Florence
Adoration of Shepherds (attributed)
Preaching of John the Baptist – San Niccolò Oltrarno, Florence.
Michelangelo presents his model of San Lorenzo to Leo X (1617–19) – Casa Buonarroti, Florence
The Wedding of Caterina de Medici to Henry II
Drunkedness of Noah – Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Saint Clair accepts the veil (vows) (1620) – Caen, France
Final Judgement
Pala della Concezione – San Bartolomeo
“Three Marys At Tomb”, -Blanton Art Museum, Austin, Texas