Giovanni Battista Foggini

After training in Florence, Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652 – 1725, Florence, Italy) was sent to Rome in 1673 by Cosimo III de’ Medici, grand duke of Tuscany, to attend the new Accademia Fiorentina. He returned home in 1676 with the characteristic Baroque, painterly style he kept for life. Foggini’s reliefs often display contrasting diagonals and skies with mythological or Christian figures amid clouds and shafts of light. Drapery is characterized by a rippling pattern, which Foggini contrasts with smoothly modeled, highly polished areas of naked flesh.

After Fernando Tacca’s death in 1687, Foggini was appointed grand ducal sculptor and within the decade became the court architect as well. His position with the Medici was all-powerful and secure. In addition to busts of Florentine luminaries and the Medici, Foggini’s major works include reliefs made for various chapels in Florence. His many pupils prolonged his style well past the middle of the eighteenth century, until the advent of Neoclassicism.