Lot 149: - Giovacchino Fortini (1670-1736) Italian, Florence, late 17th/ early 18th century , A marble bust of Ferrante Capponi

on green marble column

measurements note bust: 70cm., 27½in. overall: 168cm., 66in.

S. Bellesi & M. Visonà, Giovacchino Fortini. Scultura, architettura, decorazione e committenza a Firenze al tempo degli ultimi Medici, Florence, 2008 (forthcoming, to be published in November 2008), II, no. 8

Giovacchino Fortini was the foremost portrait sculptor in Florence during the first third of the eighteenth century. Trained under Carlo Marcellini and Giuseppe Piamontini, Fortini worked on the sculptural decoration of the Feroni Chapel in Santissima Annunziata (1691-93) and later succeeded him as the court architect of the Medici. In 1701 he sculpted the funerary monument of Philipp Degenhard Joseph von Hochkirchen, wgich was shipped to Cologne to be installed in the Cathedral (still in situ). Sandro Bellesi and Mara Visonà, who will be publishing the present bust in their monograph on Fortini, argue that this bust of an unknown sitter is an early work of Fortini.