Nunziata d'Antonio
Nunziato d'Antonio di Domenico, known as Nunziata (1468–1525) was an Italian painter, fireworks artist, and bombardier of Renaissance
Life
Nunziata's life and career are very sparsely documented. By 1499 we know that Nunziata had joined the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine artists’ confraternity. The artist was also listed in Compagnia's membership book of 1503-5, the so-called Libro rosso. In 1515 he was paid for painting a cross in SS. Annunziata, in preparation for the consecration of the church by
The anomaly of Nunziata's place in the history of art begins with his name—styled after none other than the Annunciate Virgin Mary. It was a name exceedingly rare in fifteenth-century Florence, whether in its male or female form. Indeed, the only other Florentine known to have received it during the fifteenth century was a foundling baptized in 1470—but significantly, even in this case her given name was ‘Onesta’, and she received ‘Nunziata’ only as her baptismal name (which would never be used again after the baptismal ceremony). In documents, the painter's name appears in both the feminine version cited by Vasari and in the masculine form, Nunziato. It is the latter that appears in the newly discovered record of the artist's birth and baptism, which dates from 22 October 1468. Until now Nunziata's birthdate was erroneously given in the literature as 1475.
A document of 1517 names Nunziata and his son Toto as witnesses to the will of a legnaiuolo named Giuseppe di Lorenzo in the parish of San Pancrazio in September 1517. Surprisingly, here Nunziata is identified not as a painter but as a bombardier (‘Nunziato Antonii Dominici bombardiere’). Apparently as an old man, he must have fallen upon hard times. It was common for out-of-work craftsmen to moonlight as bombardiers (well-known examples include Raffaello da Montelupo and Zanobi Lastricati), though it was generally the province of masters in the more physically demanding arts, such as cannon-founders, sculptors, and scalpellini. Nunziata is a rare, if not unique example of a Renaissance painter working as a bombardier. In all likelihood, the skills of mixing and manipulating gunpowder to create his fuochi d’artificio turned out to be easily transferable to the job of an artilleryman when there was not enough painting work to stave the wolf from the door.
On 28 September 1519 Nunziata personally came forward to give his blessing as his son Antonio, called Toto del Nunziata, contracted to work abroad with
The painting business must have been looking up by 1521, just as Nunziata's personal affairs were hitting the rocks. In July of that year, a decree of the Florentine criminal court of the Otto di Guardia e Balìa again refers to him as ‘pictor’ in a judgment by which they condemned him to pay a four-florin fine to the magistracy, to hand over two florins to a certain Andrea di Biagio, and to satisfy an unspecified debt to Andrea's son Biagio. The substantial fine that the artist was sentenced to pay to the court (in addition to what he owed the plaintiffs) implies that Nunziata was also being punished for some kind of misdeed, though its nature is not made clear by the magistrates’ decree.
Vasari's account
Vasari described Nunziata as a ‘dipintore di fantocci’. Literally, this means a painter of dolls or puppets, and it is in just such a literal sense that scholars have generally interpreted Vasari's epithet. Yet such an interpretation overlooks several important problems. First, there was no special profession of doll-painter or puppet-painter per se in Renaissance Italy. It is hardly a coincidence that the great myths and fables about professional toymakers—from the Brothers Grimm to Collodi—all belong to the nineteenth century.
Further evidence that Vasari meant the phrase ‘dipintore di fantocci’ in a metaphorical sense comes from the context in which he uses the word fantoccio elsewhere in the Lives. On nearly every other occasion in which the word fantoccio or one of its cognates appears in the Lives, Vasari uses it as a term of deprecation to signify a crudely sketched figure, a daub, a work reminiscent of a child's doodles. Thus Vasari uses the term fantoccio to describes
‘Se bene era dipintore di fantocci’, however, Vasari could still appreciate two things in which Nunziata was a ‘persona rara’. The first was his skill in making the fireworks, and especially the girandole for San Giovanni (evidently he was much more talented in this line than the unnamed girandola-makers succeeding him, whom Vasari disparages as ‘fantocciai’). The other remarkable quality Nunziata possessed, according to the biographer, was his gift of infinite jest, which rendered his company and conversation agreeable to all. Thus Nunziata belongs to that other taxonomy of artists in the Lives such as
Anecdotes
Vasari's two anecdotes about Nunziata's burle are very well known.
In the first, he tells of a Florentine patron who allegedly ordered Nunziata to paint a Crucifixion for the summer apartments on the camera terrena of his house. The customer was so stupid and inarticulate that he expressed his desire with the ambiguous request for ‘a Crucifixion for the summer’ (un Crucifisso per la state). Playing his client for the ignorant fool that he was, Nunziata painted the crucified Christ seasonably dressed in calzoni, or short, loose-fitting breeches.
Another patron, disgusted by artists who seemed capable only of making pictures that were inducements to lust (cose lascive), asked Nunziata to paint him a Madonna who was honourable, visibly old, and not of the sort to incite impure thoughts. In response, Nunziata painted a Madonna with a beard—flouting his patron's excessive religious scruples with a satire that dangerously crossed the line of what many contemporaries would have considered blasphemous.
These stories are tropes about the mischievous artist such as are found in
Lasca follows his story about Cimabue with another humorous anecdote about Nunziata, which has been completely overlooked in the literature on the painter. After describing Cimabue's bizarre image, he continues:
Il simigliante fece ancora il Nuntiata, perciò che, havendo fatto un Tubbia, in scambio del pesce li dipinse in mano un catellino francesco.
Instead of carrying the fish whose entrails would heal his father, Tobias in Nunziata's painting carried a little French dog of a type that had been fashionable in Florence since the fourteenth century! In Lasca's anecdote, unlike Vasari's, the joke does not hinge on Sacchetti-like mockery of an ignorant layman; the point of the story is the artist's playfulness, embracing the absurd by dreaming up unexpected juxtapositions of iconographic elements.
Painted by Ghirlandaio?
A record of his physical appearance may have been left to us by his friend
Death
The date of Nunziata’s death, known to the nineteenth-century archivist Gaetano Milanesi (who did not cite a specific documentary source for his information), has now been confirmed by the record of his burial, which took place in Santa Trinita (the church of the parish in which he had been born) on 13 April 1525. The choice of the Vallombrosan convent church for the painter’s burial church was likely influenced by the fact that Nunziata had been a parishioner of S. Trinita from the time of his birth in that parish until the very end of his life.
Family
The Florentine baptismal records also make it possible to establish the correct birthdate of Nunziata’s son, the painter Toto del Nunziata, who was born on 8 January 1498 (modern style), as claimed by Milanesi, and not on 18 January 1499 as stated by Colnaghi and subsequent writers following him. A third child of Nunziata’s, a daughter named Lisabetta, was born on the feast of the santo patrono John the Baptist in 1499, while two other sons are mentioned as living in Nunziata’s house shortly after the painter’s death in 1525; but Toto is the only member of the family who is known to have continued in the professional footsteps of their father.
The census of Florentine men available to bear arms, drawn up some in 1527, identifies Nunziata’s former home as less than a block away from Santa Trinita, in the via del Parione that runs along the church’s northern flank. Still living there at the time of the census were two other sons of Nunziata, whose identities have not emerged from the Florentine baptismal records, together with ‘un garzone e un factore’. Neither of those two sons can be identified with Toto del Nunziata, for it appears that Toto never came back to the house in via del Parione. Instead, after embarking for England together with Torrigiani around 1519, he remained on
Bibliography
- Vasari, Giorgio; Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e 1568, eds. Rosanna Bettarini and Paola Barocchi, 6 vols., Florence, 1966–87, V, p. 439.
- Waldman, Louis A.; “‘Se bene era dipintore di fantocci...’: Nunziata d’Antonio, Painter, Pyrotechnician and Bombardier of Florence," Paragone (in press).