Lodovico Cigoli

Cigoli, born Lodovico Cardi, helped move Florentine painting from late Mannerism toward the Baroque. His religious pictures are emotional and warm in colour, with soft light that led people to call him the “Florentine Correggio”.

He was born in 1559 at Castelvecchio di Cigoli, near San Miniato, and trained in Florence under Alessandro Allori. He studied Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, Pontormo and Correggio and was influenced by Federico Barocci. His Ecce Homo is in the Palazzo Pitti, and he painted several versions of Saint Francis receiving the stigmata. He spent his last years in Rome, where he painted Saint Peter Healing the Lame Man for Saint Peter’s. He was a friend of Galileo, and his fresco in the dome of the Pauline Chapel in Santa Maria Maggiore shows the Moon as Galileo had seen it through his telescope. He died in Rome in 1613.

In Ecce Homo, look at the restraint: the emotion is in the faces, not in dramatic gesture.