Pietro Neri Scacciati

Essay:

Son of Andrea Scacciati the flower painter, relatively little is known about Pietro Neri's life. He was superintendent of Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence and entered the Adademy of Drawing in 1715 five years after the death of his father. Along with his father and Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648 – 1729), Andrea Scacciati was the most important Florentine painter of still lifes in the first decades of the 1700s.

The Tuscan aristocracy supported the artist, including the last two Medici Grand Dukes: Cosimo III and his son Gian Gastone. The Dukes commissioned approximately one hundred paintings of flora and fauna from Scacciati for the Villa dell' Ambrogiana, work which Pietro Nero's father and Bimbi had already begun. The artists drew their inspiration both from living and from taxidermy animals in the Medici’s collections. The aim of this project was to document rare species, animals captured on the ducal estates, or those animals living in the ducal menagerie.

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The grand scale of this painting of fowl suggests that the picture was commissioned for a grand palazzo. This piece may have formed part of the celebrated series of animal paintings commissioned by the last two Medici grand dukes - Cosimo III and Gian Gastone de'Medici. The series of approximately a hundred pictures was painted by Bartolomeo Bimbi and Pietro Neri Scacciati during the first four decades of the eighteenth century and were destined to be displayed in the princely setting of the Medici Villa Ambrogiana.

Provenance:

Private Collection, Italy