Cosimo III fortifying the harbour of Leghorn. Preparatory drawing for one of the Giovanni silver plates

About this work

This large and impressive drawing, hitherto attributed to Hinrich Krock, is a study by Filippo Luzi for one of the so-called piatti di S. Giovanni; silver plates which the Pallavicini family and their heirs presented to the Grand Dukes of Tuscany every year from 1680 to 1737 on the feast of St John (24 June), in accordance with the will of Cardinal Lazzaro Pallavicini. The plates were melted down around 1800, during the French invasion, but they are recorded in plaster casts in the Museo degli Argenti, Florence. They were made by different silversmiths from drawings by various painters. As Jennifer Montagu has demonstrated, the longest partnership was between the silversmith Ludovico Barchi and the painter Filippo Luzi, to whom this drawing can be attributed.[1] Luzi succeeded his teacher and friend Lazzaro Baldi, who was paid for the designs from 1698 to 1702. When Baldi died in April 1703 at the age of 79, he had probably already left the designs of the silver plates to his most talented pupil Filippo Luzi, who along with Giovanni Battista Lenardi was the executor of Baldi’s will. All the plates depict subjects from the history of the Medici family. Before 1700 they were…