Giovan Battista Montini

(Firenze, 1613 - Firenze, 1673)

On the back: sealing wax seal with patriarchal cross and initials FP; inscription in ink on the frame: 1635. Carved and gilded wooden frame, 19th century. Expertise by Dr. Filippo Gheri.
Bibliography: 2001 - 2002, C. Oliveti, Contribution to the rediscovery of Giovanni Montini, in "Proporzioni", II – II, pp. 139 -163.



"An artist of excellent qualities, Giovanni Montini (Florence, 1613 -1673) has only recently regained the place he deserves in the framework of seventeenth-century Florentine painting, and this is thanks to the weighty – and in many ways exemplary – contribution of Chiara Oliveti, which appeared just over twenty years ago.   On that occasion the scholar also published the Samson and Delilah presented here - which however was known to her only in photographs -, suggesting a placement in the first half of the 1650s. This proposal seems today - in front of the painting - to be fully confirmed. Indeed, among the works of those years, undoubtedly the best in the artist's career, the re-emerged Samson seems to want to claim the palm, both for the fineness of pictorial orchestration - tuned to daring colors -, and for compositional sagacity, not commonly found in Montini at such a high level. These traits, supported by a marked formal exuberance, already declare that process of emancipation of the painter from the ways of the master Vignali (now only hovering in the somatic types and in some posing solutions) is underway, destined to be completed in the last decades of his activity."

Philip Gheri