CECCHI, GIOVANNI MARIA. — Man of letters, born in Florence, according to the most reliable date, on 15 March 1518. Following the family tradition, he was a notary (1542–1577); he held honorary offices and engaged in commerce in partnership with the Adimari, Segni, and Baldesi.
His fame is linked to his activity as a playwright.
An admirer of Plautus and Terence, he began with secular comedies, but gradually moved away from this close imitation, carried along by his temperament as an observer of contemporary life (cf. the Prologue to Assinoio, the best of his Commedie osservate, but also the most licentious, adapted from a novella by Boccaccio), especially in the popular farces. As the years passed, his spirit of religious piety grew keener; he felt remorse for this production and sought to make amends by composing, for the edification and moral improvement of his audiences, exclusively comedies on sacred subjects for convents and devout confraternities, not without an admixture of biblical and fantastic elements. He took up the tradition of sacred plays, reducing them almost to classical form and modernizing them by adopting the use of blank verse, as in Esaltazione della croce (Florence 1586), which for a long time remained his only published sacred drama. Only in 1895 was a collection issued, in which Il figliuol prodigo is noteworthy: it was developed, with the customary Plautine intrusions and a certain realistic lack of restraint, according to the Gospel scheme, whose inner pathos it fails to evoke.
C.'s liveliness of Florentine language, for which he was cited by the Crusca, is much praised. It should be remembered that he investigated historical subjects (Compendio di più ritratti..., Bologna 1867) and composed several poems. He died at his villa in Lastra a Signa on 28 October 1587 and was buried in the church of S. Michele, which he had restored and provided with a small convent.