Per una storia degli alberi genealogici dei fiorentini: incisioni, dipinti e documenti da Scipione Ammirato ad Alessandro Bonini
Pasquale Focarile
After the first publication of the Genealogical Tree of the Medici Family (1569), many Florentine families resorted to the same “inventor”, the genealogist Scipione Ammirato, asking him for their family trees. Starting from a review of the engravings produced by Ammirato and his heir, Cristoforo del Bianco, this article explores their iconographic characteristics. It sheds light on the dynamics of production and diffusion. Unpublished documents demonstrate the entrepreneurial nature of Ammiratos’ activity, which involved professional designers and painters, sometimes tasked with the execution of paintings on canvas. The painted production will last much longer than the two Ammiratos’ activity throughout the Seventeenth century, when specialized painters worked for the Florentine patriciate and painted large genealogical trees on canvas, often indebted to Ammirato’s inventions, or faithful copies. Among these painters, Alessandro Bonini – a painter completely overlooked by scholarship – will be presented as one of the most recognizable through analyzing four of his newly discovered works.