The Four Seasons - Spring(Giova Battista Vanni)
Giovan Batistta Vanni painted Spring as
a maiden holding a floral wreath,
seated in the gardens at the Medici
Villa Reale di Castello before an informally
draped cloth-of-honour. Immediately to her
right is the Fiorenza fountain with a cypress
bosquet beyond. In the middle ground at
left, a group of five lightly draped young
women gather flowers and make wreaths;
one wears an elaborate turban; another
supports a child on her back. Two other
children sit at Springs feet and pick red
carnations, which echo the lush tomato red
of the drapery behind her. All of the figures
are engulfed in accurately detailed floral still
lifes featuring roses, tulips, and other
seasonal flowers.
Spring is undoubtedly the most difficult
picture to assess in the Matthiesen series.
While the picture is stylistically similar to
Autumn the sfumato in the figures, the cloud
formation (if not the actual of blue) in the
sky, and the blanket-like folds of the
draperies are all comparable the pictures
differ significantly in the main figures and in
the children, which, in Spring, are more
ethereal and less robust than those in
Autumn. Equally, while Summer, Autumn, and
Winter all appear to have direct borrowings
from or parallels with the tapestry designs by
Salviati and Stradanus, Spring does not. Nor
does Vanni appear to have derived his garden
setting from those featured by Stradanus or
de Vos in their compositions for this season,
as it does not include architecture, courtly
figures, a horizon line, or, in fact, any sense
of the outside world. Instead, Vanni painted
his garden directly based on those at
Castello as a true locus amoelis, a place of
lovely refuge. This is a topos for allegories of
love and spring that dates back to Boccaccio,
and while it lapsed in popularity in
Florentine art after the 16th century; it
endured far more favourably in Roman,
Bolognese and French baroque painting.
The mise-en-scene and the artists approach to
anatomy are the two things that distinguish
Spring from the other three pictures in the
series. However, when these two aspects of
the painting are assessed in the light of
Vannis career, they begin to make sense
within context of the series.
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Vanni was a peripatetic artist, who,
having studied and worked in Florence
and Pisa with a succession of artists
(including Empoli, Lomi, Rosselli, and
Cristofano Allori), spent significant periods
of his early career in Rome, Parma, and later
in Venice, each of which were to have a
profound, if not exactly successive, effect on
his stylistic development. We now
understand a great deal more about Vannis
development as a painter (which, previously,
had been far less understood than his career
as an engraver), largely through the research
undertaken by Giovanni Pagliarulo, and
particularly, Francesca Baldassari.113
Consequently, we now know that between
1624 and 1626, Vanni lived in Rome with
Orazio Riminaldi, Simon Vouet and Nicholas
Poussin and that, contrary to what
Baldinucci records, he later returned to the
city after his formative Parmese period
(1626-1629), when he lived with Alessandro
Algardi and Baldassare Aloisi, an engraver
and a relative of the Carracci. In 1632, he
returned to Florence and worked with Lippi,
Vignali, Rosselli, Cesare Dandini, Baccio del
Bianco and Ottavio Vannini on the Saint Paul
cycle commissioned by the Confraternity of
Saint Paul. By this date, Vannis reputation
must have been well established, as he was
given three of the most important sections of
the commission: those depicting the saints
conversion, his encounter with the viper, and
his martyrdom.
Vanni also spent brief periods in Pistoia and
Venice, before returning again to Florence in
late 1638, the date around which he may
have painted Spring. However, his varying
absorption of Roman, Bolognese,
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113 The possibility that Spring could be by Vanni was one that the Gallery was encouraged to reconsider by Prof. Miles Chappell,
who pointed out the significant research on Vanni recently published by Francesca Baldassari. (M. Chappell, e-mail
communication, 22 December, 2008.) For a detailed timeline of Vannis career and development, see F. Baldassari, in Il Seicento
Fiorentino, Biographie, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 1987, pp.177-179; and F. Baldassari, Precisazioni sull-attività giovanile di
Giovan Battista Vanni, in Paradigma, vol. 9, 1989, pp, 129-139, pls. 35-45; and G. Pagliarulo,
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correggesque, and possibly even French
styles throughout the first half of his career
had a complex influence on his development
as a painter. Based on stylistic aspects, which
have been variously perceived to be
correggesque, Bolognese, or Florentine,
Vannis paintings have been attributed
previously to Vignali, Biliverti, Mario Balassi,
Cecco Bravo, and even Sigismondo
Coccapani.
Vanni must have painted Spring after 1632,
when he returned to Florence from Parma,
having carefully studied and recorded
Correggios frescoes in the Duomo. In an
essay in which she published Vannis Holy
Family with St. John and St. Anne in the Palmer
Museum, Baldassari states that after the
Parma trip, Vanni became deeply impressed
by the proto-baroque art of Correggio, with
its subtle use of light, softness of flesh and
figure, sweetness of facial expression, and
fluidity of paint handling.114 These
correggesque features are all apparent in the
figure of Spring; her high, broad forehead,
tapering nose, small chin, and hooded gaze
all derive from Correggios work
(particularly his Madonnas), as does her
figure type, and, to a lesser degree, that of
the children.115 In this regard, Spring is
stylistically similar to Vannis Saint Sebastian
cured by Pious Women (1630-1632) in San
Giovanni dei Fiorentini (Fig. 17), but these
corregesque facial and figure types appears
to have been fairly consistent in Vannis work
after 1629 and before about 1638, after
which some cortonesque influences appear
to take hold.
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Vannis interest in architecture, another
lesser known aspect of his career, is
beautifully illustrated in his inclusion of
Tribolos Fiorenza fountain (Fig. 12), to
which he gave pride of place in his
composition. Vanni painted the fountain with
a sure command of perspective and
structural understanding in precise detail
using delicate brushstrokes and subtle
114 F. Baldassari, The Florentine Baroque: Giovan Battista Vanni, included in Continuity, Innovation and Connoisseurship: Old
Master Paintings at the Palmer Museum of Art, Penn, State University Press, 2003, p.100, fig., 18.
115 See C. Gould, The Paintings of Correggio, London, 1976, nos. 90A, 93, 95A, 97A, and 99, illus.
gradations of grey, lead white and umber to
articulate every curve of Lascatis bronze, as
well as the tritons, dolphins, and the goat
skulls on the marble base. Vanni clearly, did
not include the fountain as a mere prop to
denote a formal garden, as was traditional in
lyrical narratives, and as he may have done in
the attributed Rinaldo and Armida in
Vienna.116 Instead, the fountain is a specific
reference to this showpiece of Cosimo Is
gardens at Castello, and was included
perhaps at the behest of the series patron,
who may have enjoyed favour at the court of
Ferdinando II. Vanni must have made studies
of the fountain at Castello, possibly at the
same time he made the studies after
Botticellis La Primavera, now in the Uffizi.117
Vanni probably based the poses (and possibly
the costumes) of the women in Spring on
figures in an Allegory of Sleep, painted by
Giovanni Battista Naldini for the Studiolo of
Ferdinando I (Fig. 18), another work he must
have studied at firsthand in the Palazzo
Vecchio. Beginning in 1620, with his
frescoes for the Casino Mediceo, Vanni
worked extensively for the Medici courts,
and continued to do so more or less
throughout his career. His work as a painter
for the Medici is well known, but a group of
drawings in the Albertina may also connect
Vanni to Giulio Parigis work for the
grottoes at the Palazzo Pitti, as well as to
some of the elaborate ephemeral decorations
for court festivities.118
It is also possible that Vanni may have derived
some of his motifs, such as the red cloth of
honour, from works by Francesco Albani,
either in the collection of Cardinal Carlo de
Medici (for whom Vanni painted several
pitture da camera), or in the Aldovrandini
collections, which Vanni may have seen
during his periods in Rome. It is also worth
considering that Vanni may have been
influenced by northern artists, like Pietro
116 See LArme e gli Amori, La Poesia di Ariosto, Tasso e Guarini nell-arte fiorentina del Seicento, exhib. cat., Florence, Palazzo Pitti, 2001,
p. 61, fig. 7.
117 A. Petrioli Tofani, Su alcuni disegni di Giovan Battista Vanni, in Prospettiva, 1999, no. 93-94, p. 165, fig. 7.
118 Baldassari, op. cit., 1987, p.179.
Mera, a Flemish-Venetian artist, who worked
in Florence in the early 17th century painting
allegorical and classical subjects on copper.
The exquisite quality of the floral painting in
Spring clearly points to a still-life painter of
the highest calibre, an artist who was welltrained
in the still-life traditions of Ligozzi
and Empoli. All of the flowers traditionally
associated with the season are included:
eglantine, shrub roses, daffodils, narcissi,
muguet, calendula, carnations, primula, and
rendered in great detail, at least three types
of tulip, which were particularly prized at
the time.119 All of these flowers bloom in
spring and many are associated specifically
with Venus (roses, myrtle, and narcissi), or
the Virgin (carnations, calendula, lily-of-thevalley,
primroses). Others, like the daffodil
are more general symbols of rebirth. Each
flower is depicted, not only as a botanical
specimen, but as a paragon of the flower
itself, an approach that derives directly from
Ligozzi, and is specifically illustrated in the
botanical murals painted between 1614 and
1615 by the Veronese artist Girolamo Pini.
Unfortunately, nothing in Vannis known
work indicates he was a floral painter,
although he was known to have been adept at
landscape. Moreover, the floral elements
almost appear to have been painted after
Vannis main composition, and perhaps
again, an alternative hand should be
considered, such as Martinelli, or the
aforementioned anonymous still-life painter
associated with Vignalis studio. However,
the copious use of white highlights and the
specific detail in the tulips possibly point to a
northern hand working in Florence at the
time, such as an artist associated with the
studios of Daniel Seghers or Cornelius
Schut. In this regard, it would also be
tempting to connect Spring with the
encyclopaedic floral allegories painted by
Hendrik van Balen with Jan (Velvet)
Breughel, possibly via the many Flemish stilllife
painters employed by the Medici, but
this is purely speculative.
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119 The artist appears to have depicted Rosen, Bizarden and Violetten tulips, types which were among the most prized and
sought after during the highly speculative market for the bulbs, the so-called tulipmania, which peaked in 1637.