After attending the Latin School in Florence, Simone Pignoni worked with a close relation, who made bindings for books. The young man delighted in delineating the complicated coats-of-arms of the nobility and public bodies, and his talent was noticed by the famous painter Domenico Passignano who sent him to Fabrizio Boschi’s studio before accepting him in his own. Pignoni, however, chaffed at his Master’s teachings because he wanted to express the same originality and verve in art as in his social life where he was already famous for his brilliant conversation. He then studied with the celebrated Francesco Furini (1603-1646), whose manner and “licenziose invenzioni” were to exert the greatest influence on his style. Pignoni may not, indeed, have begun his career as an independent artist until after Furini’s death in 1646. 

Although open to the innovations of contemporaries, like Francesco Montelatici  called Cecco Bravo (1601-1661), and to the influences of the visiting luminaries, Pietro da Cortona and Luca Giordano, Simone Pignone remained faithful throughout his long career to the sensualist trend in Florentine art, as exemplified by Furini. Many of his works have, in fact, been attributed in the past to his teacher. Contemporaries saw many parallels between the two men’s working habits and ways of life. Both paid exorbitant fees to obtain the most beautiful female models of the day, while each man repented late in life of having used their talents to such ends, consigning drawings and paintings to the flames (1).

Pignoni has, however, a quite different artistic personality when compared to Furini. He is essentially a Baroque master with a love of invention, movement, richness and fluid, sweeping brushwork, while Furini’s calligraphic style, sense of pattern and cool colouring disclose, as Rudolf Wittkower noted, an "attachment to the Mannerist tradition" (2). Their treatment of the female nude is also fundamentally different. Whereas Furini’s ideal was a supple, almost boneless, body, Pignoni favoured a fuller, more overtly physical, model for his “femmine”, of the type that the artist can be seen fleshing in over a skeleton in the Self-Portrait in the Uffizi (3).

This hitherto unrecorded Maenad and Satyr shows Pignoni’s art at its most opulent and full-blooded. The maenad’s slightly unstable backward-leaning  pose on a bent knee is characteristic of the painter, and can be seen in, for example, in the artist’s Rinaldo restraining Armida which exists in two versions (4). The juxtaposition of an illuminated female figure, often naked, and a male counterpart in the shadows with a high-lighted forehead, as in the present canvas, is one of the artist’s favourite compositional devices. It recurs in more dramatic form in some of his most celebrated works, like the Rape of Lucretia in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (5), the Rape of Persephone in the Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck (6), and David and Abigail in a private collection, Florence (7).

The brilliantly painted striped tulips, bedewed roses, jasmine and boules de neige, arranged like a loose bouquet, in the bottom right-hand corner of the canvas constitute a notable feature of this Maenad and Satyr. They were executed by Andrea Scacciati who, along with Bartolomeo Bimbi (1648-1730), was the most accomplished painter of still-lives in late seventeenth-century Florence (8). His hand can be detected in similar flowers in many of Pignoni’s pictures, such as the the Rape of Persephone in the Schloss Ambras, Innsbruck, and the half-length representations of St. Dorothy (9). 

Pignoni’s paintings are notoriously hard to date because little documentation exists for his work with the exception of three altarpieces, which were executed relatively late in the artist’s career (10). Critics have, therefore, had to use elements of style in order to establish a chronology for Pignoni’s œuvre.  In the case of present Maenad and Satyr, itsstrikingly Baroque aspect indicates that the canvas is a work of the artist’s maturity. This would seem to be confirmed by the likeness between this Maenad’s profile with its distinctive upturned nose and that of the woman at the bottom centre of St. Louis of France feeding the Poor of 1682 in S. Felicita, Florence, where there is also a similar highly wrought, golden vessel (11). The collaboration between Pignoni and Scacciati also points to a relatively late date for our picture.

Notes

1. For Simone Pignoni see:  G. Ewald, “Simone Pignoni, a little known Florentine Seicento Painter”, in The Burlington Magazine, CVI, 734, pp. 218-26; G. Cantelli, “Per Simone Pignoni”, in Antichità viva, 1974, 2, pp. 18-30; and G. Cantelli, Repertorio della pittura fiorentina del Seicento, Florence, 1983, pp. 122-24, pls. 613-648. For Pignoni’s life by his pupil Giovan Camillo Sagrestani see:  P. Bigongiari, Il Seicento fiorentino, Florence, 1982, pp. 128-30.
2. R. Wittkower, Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750, Harmondsworth, 1980, p. 344.
3. G. Ewald, op. cit., p. 222, fig. 43 (engraving by G.G. Prenner after the original).
4.  
5. ibid., pl. 628.
6. ibid., pl. 629.
7. ibid., pl. 624.
8. R. Maffeis, op. cit., p. 97.  For Andrea Scacciati see:  M. Mosco, in La natura morta in Italia, Milan, 1989, II, pp. 588-91, figs. 697-701.
9. R. Maffeis, op. cit., p. 97 & G. Cantelli, op.cit., pls. 636-637.
10. G. Ewald, op. cit., pp. 221-22, figs, 32-36.
11. Illustrated by G. Cantelli, op. cit., pls. 647-648.