Baldassare Franceschini

Who was Baldassare Franceschini?

Baldassare Franceschini was an Italian late Baroque painter active mainly around Florence. He was named, from Volterra the place of his birth, Il Volterrano, or Il Volterrano Giuniore, and was the son of a sculptor in alabaster.

At an early age, he worked as an assistant to his father, a sculptor, and then studied with the Volterran artist Cosimo Daddi. This employment did not make full use of his talents, so the Marquese Inghirami placed him, at the age of sixteen, under the Florentine painter Matteo Rosselli. Both Francesco Furini and Lorenzo Lippi also trained with Rosselli. Within a year, he had advanced sufficiently to execute frescoes in Volterra with skilled foreshortening, followed by work for the Medici family in the Villa Petraia.

In 1652, the Marchese Filippo Niccolini, planning to employ Franceschini on the frescoes for the cupola and back-wall of his chapel in Santa Croce, Florence, dispatched him to various parts of Italy to improve his style. The painter, in a tour that lasted some months, took a serious interest in the schools of Parma and Bologna, and, to some extent, in the Romano-Tuscan style of Pietro da Cortona, whose acquaintance he made in Rome. He then undertook the paintings commissioned by Niccolini. These are his best works and the most well-known.