Catholic Reform and Bernardino Poccetti's Chiostro dei Morti at the church of SS Annunziata in Florence

greatest in quantity studies of the influence of the Catholic Reform change on Italian painting of the late renaissance still focus upon Rome, yet it was in Florence that this stylistic revolution was pioneered. Reformist painters of the like kind as Santi di Tito (1538 1603) and his followers directly inspired Roman commissions, including those of the youthful Society of Jesus. (1) Florence's older churches underwent major renovations before greatest in quantity of their Roman counterparts, beginning with the Dominican seat of s Maria Novella and the Franciscan s Croce in the 1560s and 1570 when Duke Cosimo I had Giorgio Vasari lay open up their naves and systematise the following of side chapels to make the mass more accessible to the race (2) These construction projects, which were the design for subsequent restorations in churches completely through northern Tuscany, involved many of the principal reform painters of the time, including Santi and Alessandro Allori (1535-1607) and they were motivated as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of by a desire to turn back to a renaissance unity of design as they were by means of Tridentine concerns. (3)

individual typically Tuscan form of revival with bases in the renaissance was the cloister lunette fresco round of years This tradition of painting the lunette beneath the vaults of cloister arcades with narrative exhibitions from the Bible, from the lives of the saints, or from the history of the originators of the religious orders, derives from prototypes of that kind as the Chiostro Verde at s Maria Novella, with frescoes by means of Paolo Uccello and assistants (second quarter of the fifteenth century) and the Chiostro degli Aranci at the Badia Fiorentina (c 1430s) and it flourished in the later renaissance with Sodoma's and Luca Signorelli's frescoe at Monte Oliveto Maggiore in the 1490 and early 1500 the Chiostro dei Voti at S Annunziata with frescoe by means of Pontormo, Rosso Fiorentino, and Andrea del Sarto (first sum of two units decades of the sixteenth century) and Andrea del Sarto's Chiostro dello Scalzo (1510-26) among others. (4) This genre owed its popularity to a combination of a straightforward and lively descriptive mode of speech with panoramic architectural and landscape settings filled of naturalistic and genre detail.

In the late cinquecento, Florentine patrons seized on the cloister lunette fresco circle of time as an ideal format for reformist didactic painting. (5) It was exquisitely suited for long narrative epics, since traditional Florentine cloisters could accommodate a prolonged series of lunettes on four walls, and it could address a large audience, since the lunette were visible from a spacious, centrally-planned, and well-lit courtyard. The extent of a lunette cycle was comparable to the series of illustrations ground in sacred books of the period, a connection made more explicit by the agency of the frescoes' regular use of captions. (6) The sequential format of cloister lunette periods also gave them a triumphalist aspect, since they evok a procession and also recalled the circle of times of ephemeral paintings of biographical episodes which decorated state funerals and weddings, greatest in quantity notably the exequies of Michelangelo in 1564 and the wedding of Francesco de' Medici in 1566 (7)

The campaign of post-Tridentine cloister lunette circle of times began with the Chiostro Grande at s Maria Novella in 1581, and if was pretty soon followed by examples at the Compagnia della S Annunziata (or s Pierino, c. 1585), S Salvatore d'Ognissanti (1599-1624) s Maria degli Angeli (1600-1601), s Marco (1602-1604), S Spirito, and S Annunziata in Florence (1605-18) as well as places outside of the city like as SS Annunziata in Pistoia (1601-1602) In addition to Santi and Allori, who directed the s Maria Novella cycle, a novel generation of painters worked upon these commissions, including Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627) Giovanni Battista Naldini (1537-91) and Giovanni da San Giovanni (1592-1636) Unlike their precursors, these of recent origin cycles focused almost exclusively upon the founders or ideological leaders of the various religious orders or confraternities. They turn backed to the classicising and naturalistic narrative turn of expression of Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530) and they had a panoramic character and delight in detail which recalled earlier Florentine fresco painters of that kind as Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-94) or Benozzo Gozzoli (1420-97) (8) individual of the main contributors to these circle of times was Bernardino Barbatelli, known as Poccetti (1548-1612) from s Marino Val d'Elsa, a now rather underrated artist whom Filippo Baldinucci considered a painter 'di prima classe'. (9)

Poccetti became the premier practitioner of reformist narrative painting. Beginning in the 1590 his works depart almost completely from the maniera, with its moderately cold and flat light, its liability to crowd figures against the picture plane, and its self-conscious complexity and virtuosity. (10) Combining warm and vivid pastel colours with spacious settings and rational compositions, Poccetti populated his pageants with realistic and legible figures animated by the agency of a dramatic and easily comprehensible story line. His settings and figure impressed signs alike owed a debt to Sarto, while his enthusiasm for narrative clarity was also influenced by means of Santi, who had worked with the younger artist at s Maria Novella. Poccetti enriched his frescoe with a wealth of detail, whether in natural landscape uncompounded bodys or genre, creating scenes whose visual splendour and human interest captivated viewers of the day--and achieved precisely that combination of delectare, docere, movere ('to delight, to teach, to move') which Catholic churchmen were calling for in religious painting at the time. (11)