Giovanni Battista Caccini

Who was Giovanni Battista Caccini?

Giovanni Battista Caccini was an Italian sculptor from Florence, who worked in a classicising style in the later phase of Mannerism.

He was born at Montopoli in Val d'Arno between Florence and Pisa; his training was with the sculptor-architect Giovanni Antonio Dosio, known for his accurate drawings of Roman antiquities, and Caccini's numerous interpretive restorations of Roman sculptural fragments gave him the reputation of being a knowledgeable antiquarian, while the inescapable influence of Giambologna and his circle can be seen in Caccini's bronze statuettes. Caccini was in close cooperation with Pietro Tacca and the rest of Giambologna's pupils in the prolonged cooperation over the bronze doors for the Pisa cathedral.

Fragmentary antiquities were not to the sixteenth-century collectors' taste. Caccini produced a head for an antique torso, and a further, crouching figure to produce the Bacchus and Ampelos in the Uffizi, which was once attributed to Michelangelo. He restored a fragmentary Apollo Sauroctonos as an Apollo with the Lyre.