FRANCIAIBIGIO, FRANCESCO di CRISTOFANO, known as Il. - Painter, born perhaps in Florence, of a Milanese father, about 1482; died there in 1552. A pupil of Mariotto Albertinelli and Piero di Cosimo, he had Andrea del Sarto as a companion in workshop and studies. Together with Bugiardini and others, he belongs to that circle of Florentine artists working after the example of the great masters—Raffaello, Leonardo, Michelangelo—seeking a harmony among those different modes of figurative vision.
The personality of F. is greatly inferior to that of Andrea del Sarto, with whom he shows an unquestionable affinity; and his painting often fails to achieve synthesis, remaining on the level of an eclecticism rich in intentions not resolved into art. Such is the case with the incoherent Annunciation in Turin (Pinacoteca), the monochrome frescoes in the cloister of the Scalzo in Florence, etc. At times he understood the influence of the greatest masters better: as in the Marriage of the Virgin in the cloister of the Annunziata (1531), a fresco revealing the impression made by A. del Sarto upon F.; in the Raphaelesque Madonna of the Well (Florence, Uffizi), in the Madonna with Jesus and the Young John, in the Liechtenstein Gallery in Vienna, more Michelangelesque in its plasticity, but Raphaelesque in composition. F.'s colour is fresh and luminous, and he proves to be a noteworthy portrait painter (Portrait of a Man [1517] in Vienna, Liechtenstein Gallery; two portraits formerly in the Berlin Gallery, etc.).