The present paper focuses on the beginning of the artistic career of one of the main exponents of Vasari’s workshop, Jacopo Zucchi. Although this painter’s first concrete interventions are unanimously acknowledged to be only on the ceiling of the Salone dei Cinquecento (1563-1565), his presence is recorded on a weekly basis in the registers of the Scrittoio Fortezze e Fabbriche medicee well before the start of the more famous worksite. Through a re-examination of these documents, together with stylistic comparisons, the paper aims to trace and isolate a group of paintings sharing well-defined characteristics extraneous to Vasari’s and Stradano’s lexicon.
Some of the paintings on the ceilings of the Sala delle Sabine and the Sala di Penelope in the Quartiere di Eleonora show a hesitancy and naivety in their execution typical of the hand of a young novice slavishly attempting to imitate the style of his master, though without succeeding in achieving formal balance or compositional coherence. Through comparisons with later works, this artist can now be identified as Jacopo Zucchi himself, since the paintings in the Quartiere di Eleonora show traces of embryonic stylistic and formal peculiarities that would similarly characterize his later works. As well as outlining more clearly the first steps taken by Vasari’s young pupil, the paper also seeks to analyze as a whole the functioning of a specific moment in the Aretine’s twenty-year-long worksite; the aim is to clarify the involvement of the many people gravitating around Palazzo Vecchio who are too often neglected due to the overriding fame of the older master.