"A bizarre and whimsical temperament"

As part of the "Lands of the Uffizi" project, the Museum of Terre Nuove and the Museum of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie in San Giovanni Valdarno welcome "A bizarre and whimsical temperament. Giovanni da San Giovanni, a maverick painter at the Medici court", an exhibition with which the 17th-century painter "returns home".

The protagonists are ten portable round frescoes on matting, a technique that established the artist's fame, presented on this occasion along with other important works prevenient from the Uffizi Galleries and other collections.

Giovanni Mannozzi (1592-1636), who went down in history as Giovanni da San Giovanni, emerges from the early seventeenth-century landscape for his original neo-Mannerist taste, his synthetic brushstrokes, the freshness of his colors, and his particular flair.

The exhibition also enhances and highlights the artist's skill in fresco painting on portable media, a skill that earned him great success and prestigious commissions, as well as a relationship with the Medici court. Exhibited here for the first time in series are the eight tondi painted in fresco on reed matting for the Villa della Petraia around 1634, flanked by two other tondi executed with the same technique for the Villa di Pratolino.

In the second section of the exhibition, at the Museum of the Basilica of Santa Maria delle Grazie, paintings with sacred subjects are presented in dialogue with the artist's works in the museum's permanent collection: one of the two lunettes frescoed in 1621 for the Oratory of Santa Maria delle Grazie and one of the painter's few canvases, the Beheading of St. John the Baptist (1620).