Simone Pignoni

Who was Simone Pignoni?

Simone Pignoni was an Italian painter of the Baroque period.

He apprenticed with Fabrizio Boschi, then with the more academic and puritanical Domenico Passignano, and finally with Francesco Furini. He is best known for painting in a style reminiscent of the morbidly sensual Furini. Reflective of this obsession is his self-portrait, c. 1650, in which he depicts himself building up a plump naked female from a skeleton. The biographer Baldinucci, in what little he notes of the painter, recalls him as the scandalous imitator of licentious inventions.

A more complete biography was recorded by his pupil Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani. Described as endowed with a bizarre and amenable intelligence, Pignoni apparently had a late-life conversion to more pious painting. There is one episode recalled that during a serious illness because in his life he had focused on studying about female forms, and having resigned himself to the impending infinity, his spiritual father urged him to purge those errors with the flame, and once guided by a good disposition, he suddenly was cured by the Lord. Baldinucci's biography of Furini also recorded a similar, near-death renunciation of his art of the naked figure.