FRANCIABIGIO, FRANCESCO di CRISTOFANO, called il. — Painter, born perhaps in Florence, to a Milanese father, c. 1482; died there in 1552. Pupil of Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo, he had as a workshop and study companion Andrea del Sarto. Together with Bugiardini and others, he belongs to that circle of Florentine artists working under the influence of the great masters: Raphael, Leonardo, Michelangelo, seeking a harmony among those different modes of figurative vision.
FRANCIABIGIO’s personality is much inferior to that of Andrea del Sarto, with whom he reveals undoubted affinities; and his painting often does not achieve synthesis, remaining at the level of an eclecticism rich in unresolved artistic intentions. Such is the case of the disorganized Annunciation in Turin (Pinacoteca), of the monochrome frescoes in the cloister of the Scalzo, in Florence, etc. At times he better understood the influence of the greatest: as in the Sposalizio della Vergine in the cloister of the Annunziata (1531), a fresco revealing the impression of A. del Sarto upon FRANCIABIGIO; in the crowded Madonna del pozzo (Florence, Uffizi), in the Madonna with Jesus and John in the Liechtenstein Gallery in Vicenza, more Michelangelesque in its plasticity but Raphaelesque in composition. And in color FRANCIABIGIO is fresh and luminous, and he proves himself a notable portraitist (Portrait of a Man [1517] in Vienna, Liechtenstein Gallery; two portraits in the Bedino Gallery, etc.).