Italian school, circle of SIMONE PIGNONI (Florence, 1611 - 1698); second half of the 17th century.

Italian school, circle of SIMONE PIGNONI (Florence, 1611 - 1698); second half of the seventeenth century.
"St. John the Evangelist and the Virgin".
Oil on canvas (x2). Relined.
They present restorations.
Measurements: 79 x 38 cm (x2).
Pair of canvases representing the Virgin and St. John the Evangelist individually. The dimensions, the landscape, the chromatic range and the style of the works present great similarities, understanding that they are probably pieces that were part of a bigger group.
Stylistically, the works belong to the circle of the Florentine artist Simone Pignoni, an Italian painter of the Baroque period. He trained first with Fabrizio Boschi, then with Domenico Passignano, and finally with Francesco Furini. He is especially known for a style close to Furini's, characterized by a nuanced sensuality. The biographer Baldinucci, in the scarce data he offers about the painter, mentions him as a scandalous imitator of Furini's licentious inventions.
A more complete biography was written by his disciple Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani. Pignoni is described as an artist endowed with a "strange and affable" intelligence, and apparently underwent in his maturity a conversion to a more pious painting. Among his more conventional works are St. Agatha cured by St. Peter (attributed), preserved in the Museo Civico in Trieste; St. Louis offering a banquet to the poor (c. 1682), now in the church of Santa Felicita in Florence and commissioned by Count Luigi Guicciardini; and a Madonna and Child in Glory, accompanied by the archangels Michael and Raphael in armor and St. Anthony of Padua (1671), executed for the Chapel of San Michele in the Santissima Annunziata. He also painted an Allegory of Peace in the Palazzo Vecchio. A Penitent Magdalene attributed to Pignoni is in the Pitti Palace. For the church of San Bartolomeo in Monteoliveto he executed a Madonna Appearing to Blessed Bernardo Tolomei.
In addition to Sagrestani, his disciple was the priest Luca Querci, originally from Cutigliano.