Giovanni Martinelli Biography
Giovanni Martinelli (Montevarchi, November 1600 – Florence, 1659) was an Italian painter. In the Book of baptized men and women from 1550 to 1606, extracted from the books of the Priory of Montevarchi and the Propositura of Sant'Andrea a Cennano, 477, in the year 1600 it is reported that «Giov. of Lor.zo di Giov. from Montevarchi was born of legal marriage, baptized on the 10th of November 1600, appears Giulio di Gregorio Sileni priest from Arezzo". In the same book, in the year 1604 there is news of the baptism of another Giovanni da Montevarchi, which took place on 11 April. Since we know from another source that he was actually born in Montevarchi, it has been deduced that Giovanni di Lorenzo da Montevarchi is the painter who signed his canvases with the name of Giovanni Martinelli: other considerations lead us to believe that his year of birth was 1600 , rather than 1604. It is not known in what year he arrived from Montevarchi to Florence to study drawing and painting in the workshop of Jacopo Ligozzi. Here, already in 1622, the Commander of the Order of Malta Fra Francesco dell'Antella, already a client of Caravaggio, commissioned him to paint a fresco for the façade of the church of San Lorenzo in Grosseto, which has been lost. He left Ligozzi in 1625, perhaps following a legal dispute at the Court of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence dating back to 1621: during the hearing, in fact, Ligozzi called him to testify as a witness, making him unpleasant both in the eyes of clients, the rich Florentine families who naturally did not tolerate acts of social insubordination on the part of the artists, and to other painters who, depending on the commissions of these families, feared possible retaliation. It is therefore possible that, although a talented painter, he was forced due to a lack of friends and clients to leave the Florentine artistic environment and accept jobs in the province. From that 1625, his traces were lost for a few years: it was thought that he had moved to Rome, a hypothesis not based on factual data but on some Caravaggio-esque suggestions - but more from his epigones than from the Master - which are notable, even in a Florentine installation, in his first certain work, performed in 1632 for the church of San Francesco in Pescia, the Miracle of the mule, signed «IO.es MARTINELLIIUS FLOREN. FECIT MDCXXXII». However, the composition derives from the canvas of the same name by Cigoli in the church of San Francesco in Cortona, while the luministic solutions appear to be taken from the Florentines Tarchiani and Fontebuoni, painters well known to Martinelli, who had been in Rome decades earlier, remaining sensitive above all to the classicist mediation of Caravaggio created by Orazio Gentileschi. A series of paintings whose subject is Death Appears to the Guests, a moral didactic theme on the vanity of earthly goods often used by Martinelli, should date back to the mid-1930s, as well as Christ and the Samaritan woman at the well of the church of Santa Maria. Little girl in Terranuova Bracciolini and the Judgment of Solomon in a private American collection. Although he did not usually sign his paintings, often making attribution difficult, some of his major works are known, such as Saint Gregory the Great giving alms to the poor from 1653 and Belshazzar's Banquet, also from 1653, which is preserved in the Uffizi.
