|
Ranieri del Pace [Paci], Giovanni Battista
(b Pisa, 7 May 1681; d Florence, 9–27 Feb 1738). Italian painter. After an apprenticeship in Pisa with his cousin, the painter Giacomo Perri, he continued his artistic training in Florence under Pietro Dandini and Anton Domenico Gabbiani. He completed his education with Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani and became one of that painter’s most talented followers, collaborating closely with him in the execution of numerous fresco works. His style, which is characterized by an extreme dissolution of forms in whirling compositions, seems to have been based mainly on that of Sagrestani; at the same time it has something of the airiness of Luca Giordano and the threadlike, evanescent figures of Alessandro Gherardini. Ranieri del Pace worked in Tuscany as a painter of easel pictures and as a decorator. During his intense period of activity at Florence he decorated many buildings, including the ceiling of the oratory of S Tommaso d’Aquino with St Thomas Aquinas in Glory (c. 1711); the Palazzo Bargagli Petrucci (formerly Palazzo Tempi); the Palazzo Capponi with the Four Seasons, the Four Elements and Stories of Adonis (in situ); and the villa of Poggio alla Scaglia (formerly Tempi), where he collaborated with Sagrestani. He also worked in the palazzi of the Spini-Ferroni and the Giraldi-Taddei, painting the Rape of Proserpina in the latter (in situ), as well as in S Iacopo Soprarno (1709) and in the church of Ognissanti (1721). His easel paintings include St Dominic Burning the Books of the Albigenses (Bologna, priv. col.); a bozzetto (Bologna, priv. col.) for the large painting in the refectory of S Maria Novella, Florence (in situ), signed and dated 1716, which contains a pendant scene of the Resurrection of the Young Napoleone Orsini after Being Knocked Down by a Horse; and the signed Battle of Jarnac and Moncontorno (Prato, Pal. Vescovile), which was part of the sacred ornaments prepared for S Lorenzo, Florence, in 1712. Ranieri del Pace is now accepted as the painter of Esther and Ahasuerus (Florence, Bigongiari priv. col.), formerly attributed to Francesco Solimena and to Sagrestani, and of the Sacrifice of Iphigenia (Strasbourg, priv. col.), probably a bozzetto, also formerly attributed to Sagrestani.
|
|
There are more than 45,000 articles in The Grove Dictionary of Art.
To access the rest of this article, including the bibliography, subscribe to
www.groveart.com.
To find out more about this subject, click on a related article below and
subscribe to www.groveart.com
|
