Giovanna Garzoni: A Life of a Still-life Expert

Giovanna Garzoni was born in 1600 into a family of goldsmiths and artisans in Ascoli Piceno, a small town in Italy’s Marches region. She was taught oil painting by her uncle. At age 16 she painted Holy Family showing strong compositional skills and praiseworthy coloring.

For further training, her uncle took her to Venice while she was still in her teens. In this formative time, she studied painting under Palma Giovane, then Venice’s leading painter, probably from 1616 to 1620. One of her most significant works was a miniature Portrait of an Unknown Man, signed and dated Venice 1625. The portrait shows a precision technique of tiny dots created with careful brushwork. She later used this technique in her renowned still-life paintings. In its format and technique, the Unknown Man serves as a preview of one of Garzoni’s most important works.

In this period Garzoni painted Self-Portrait as Apollo (1618–1620). This unusual image shows her as a musician, with the stringed end of a viol (where her signature appears), and wearing the laurel-leaf crown of a poet. Painters gave such small self-portraits to wealthy patrons of the arts to advertise their talents as portraitists in the hopes of getting commissions. With the musical instrument and the poet’s crown, Garzoni boldly declared that she was not only a skilled portrait painter but had other talents as well. Her choice to portray herself as the male god Apollo was perhaps her way of asserting herself as a woman in a profession dominated by men.

But the strangest aspect of her time in Venice was her marriage to the portrait painter Tiberio Tinelli in 1622. The union is inexplicable, considering that many years earlier, Garzoni had made a vow of chastity—she had taken seriously a fortune teller’s prediction that she would die in childbirth. Perhaps Garzoni saw an opportunity to learn portraiture from Tinelli, but surely that instruction did not require the bonds of holy matrimony. Why Tinelli, for his part, wanted the apparently platonic marriage is anyone’s guess. The weirdness of the situation intensified when Garzoni’s father filed suit against her husband, making the claim that Tinelli had tricked Garzoni into marrying him. It is not known what led the senior Garzoni to that assertion. Venetian authorities dismissed the case because of inconsistencies and contradictions in the testimony. The marriage was dissolved in 1624.

On the Road to Success

Garzoni left Venice in 1630, accompanied by her devoted brother Mattio. They traveled in turn to Florence, Naples, and Rome; in each city, Garzoni gained instruction and clients, following the itinerant habits of male artists. In addition to painting, she excelled in calligraphy and textile art.

During these travels, it became clear that Garzoni’s abilities and interests were perfectly aligned with the zeitgeist. For one thing, it had become easier for women to exercise more control over their lives. Women artists found it less important that they be trained by their fathers. Also, by the early decades of the 1600s, the import of plants from the New World and bulbs from the Balkans and East Asia had radically altered the floral vista in Italy.

The Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany avidly collected plants and asked travelers and ambassadors to distant lands to bring back seeds and specimens. All the best villas and gardens of the aristocracy became decorated with unusual and ornamental plants. This beautiful botanical boon carried over to the arts—to celebrate their material wealth, patrons now coveted depictions of natural objects, resulting in a ready market for Garzoni’s skills and allowing her to indulge her deep interests in nature and science, especially botany.

She painted still lifes in exquisite and delicate detail, often depicting these exotic fruits and vegetables, some grown with recently developed horticultural techniques. Her subjects extended beyond farm produce to flowers, birds, insects, and animals in watercolor on vellum, a smooth parchment usually made from calfskin. Often she combined different fruits and vegetables or added living creatures to enliven the paintings.

She painted with a naturalistic style and vitality, yet with the precision more commonly found in scientific drawing, another skill that she had developed in her travels. It was in Rome in the early 1630s that Giovanna Garzoni had the opportunity to study a huge collection of botanical drawings of plants native to the region, and she learned from them how to paint details of surface texture and color gradation. Indeed, her beautiful studies of plants, elegantly composed and subtly colored, are among the finest such botanical studies of the 17th century. One outstanding example is Musa (Banana plant). Both still lifes and scientific illustration increased in popularity as the century went on, and Garzoni’s fame spread widely.

Triumph in Turin

Giovanna Garzoni thus caught the attention of Christine of Savoy, and in response to the duchess’ entreaties, arrived in Turin in the summer of 1632. Because of the influence of the Savoy rulers, who wanted the city to compete with other international courts, Turin was a hotbed of artistic and cultural ferment. The Savoy supervised the construction of important new buildings and restoration of old ones. Victor Amadeus I, Duke of Savoy and husband of Christine, had inherited a huge art collection: more than 800 paintings and antique and modern sculptures. Garzoni was one of many artists summoned to Turin from across Italy and Europe. Because she was already famous as a portraitist, the Savoy hired her to paint portraits of the ruling family that would proclaim their noble origins.

It was a highly productive time for Garzoni. She painted the ducal portraits that the family had ordered, still lifes, and religious, mythological, and allegorical scenes. Duke Victor Amadeus paid her 1,000 gold scudi a year in compensation—a fantastic sum at a time when the average personal annual income in the area was less than 37 scudi. One standout work was her posthumous portrait of Duke Charles Emmanuel I, styled after earlier works by others. She highlighted details of his armor and face, using a very fine brush in “small, light, and threadlike touches”.¹ Her work showed more delicacy and subtlety than had the earlier versions.

The Savoy court also hosted an unusual visitor in the mid-1630s: Zaga Christ, a young man who claimed to be the rightful emperor of Ethiopia. He had been traveling through Europe for a few years, ostensibly trying to find a patron state that would fund his travels back to Ethiopia, where he would reclaim the throne. In return, he would establish Catholicism as the chief religion in Ethiopia—a prospect cherished by the church and European noble circles.

By the time Christ arrived in Turin, Garzoni had been in the Savoy duchy for two years. While quite different in their backgrounds and life situations, the two shared the status of “outsider”—Garzoni as a woman pursuing a career in a field ruled by men, and Christ as a Black man and a foreigner in largely white Europe.

It was probably Christ who asked Garzoni to paint his portrait. He planned to travel to Paris and may have wanted the portrait as a gift for the French court. The format of the portrait certainly suited his peripatetic ways—it is a miniature small enough to fit in the palm of one’s hand. The earliest record of the portrait’s travels places it in the collection of a French banker in 1752, supporting the notion that Christ commissioned the piece to take with him to France. These miniatures were widely seen in Europe, including at the Savoy court, so Garzoni would have had several of them to study. The small size of such paintings made them intimate objects. They were given as tokens of friendship or to remind the owner of a loved one who had died or was far away. Queen Elizabeth I of England had a collection of them.

Garzoni painted Christ in the winter of 1635. It is considered the earliest known portrait in Western art of a Black sitter. Her work renders Christ with respect and sensitivity. In that way, it contrasts with previous portrayals of Africans in Western art—too often, they were exoticized or shown as slaves or servants. Christ wears a red and gold jacket with a broad lace collar. Garzoni used drops of watercolor to portray his wispy mustache and soft Afro hairstyle. The portrait documents this rare meeting of two outsiders at a major European court. The reverse of the portrait is equally intriguing! You can read more about it in our Masterpiece Story.

Christ left for Paris in May 1635. The 200 scudi that Duke Victor Amadeus gave him no doubt eased his departure.

Inspiration and Achievement

Giovanna Garzoni remained in Turin for two more years after Christ’s departure. In October 1637, Duke Victor Amadeus died, setting off a dispute over who would inherit the ducal throne, and Garzoni left the city. Her friendship with the well-connected duchess aided her on her travels: in London, Duchess Christine’s sister Queen Henrietta awaited her; and in Paris in the early 1640s, Duchess’ brother King Louis XIII welcomed Garzoni to his court. Little is known about her London time. Garzoni had been interested in the portraiture of John Hoskins, the leading English painter of portrait miniatures of the time. He was active in the court of King Charles I and Queen Henrietta.

Garzoni’s time in Paris, though brief, proved pivotal. She received commissions from Cardinal Richelieu and other prominent dignitaries, while also drawing inspiration from the still-life painters she encountered in the French capital. She closely studied their use of opulent floral arrangements and abundant displays of fruit and vegetables—motifs that would later become recurring elements in her later works. Her Yixing Vase Containing Diverse Flowers is an outstanding example. Along with a huge arrangement of flowers, Garzoni placed butterflies above and seashells on either side.

With a recommendation from the Florentine ambassador to France in her pocket, Garzoni found herself back in Florence in late 1642. After some highly productive years, she moved on to Rome in 1651, but continued to carry out commissions for various members of the Medici family. For decades, noble families had paid considerable amounts of money for her work, and she arrived in Rome a wealthy and celebrated artist. She died there in 1670 at age 70, and the painter’s guild buried her with great honor in its church.

Most of her works today are in the Uffizi and Pitti collections in Florence, including various portraits of nobility and cardinals Leopoldo and Richelieu. Among the still lifes, a few in particular stand out: a charming Dog with a Biscuit and a Chinese Cup, Cherries with Bean Pod and a Bee, and Birds and Fruit. They show her inventive way of combining disparate elements into one composition and her careful nature studies.

One of Garzoni’s particularly distinctive works is now in the collection of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, USA. It is the Portrait of Zaga Christ, which the museum acquired in 2021 as part of its efforts to diversify its holdings.

Author’s bio:

Carol Damioli is a retired journalist who lives in Canada. She has worked in daily newspapers, international radio, and trade magazines, and is the author of two novels involving art history.