BACCHIACCA
(b. 1494, Firenze, d. 1557, Firenze)

Deposition

c. 1518
Oil on wood, 93 x 71 cm
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Bachiacca belongs to that group of minor artists, of popular temperament and background, part-craftsmen, part-artists, free bizarre spirits in the best Florentine tradition, who in the full flowering of the sixteenth century somehow succeeded in prolonging the naturalistic tradition of Tuscan art.

This work, however youthful, shows the interest which the artist nurtured for the painting of landscape. The whole composition - besides being balanced and almost symmetrically divided by the ladders, the crosses and the group of figures - is in fact set in a rural landscape which serves not only as a background to the scene, but is the natural continuation and development of the grassy terrain in the foreground.