Giovanni Francesco Rustici

Giovan Francesco Rustici, or Giovanni Francesco Rustici, (1475–1554) was an Italian Renaissance painter and sculptor.

He was born into a noble family of Florence, with an independent income. Rustici profited from study of the Medici sculpture in the garden at San Marco, and Vasari said that Lorenzo de' Medici placed him in the studio of Verrocchio, and that after Verrocchio's departure for Venice, he placed himself with Leonardo da Vinci, who had also trained in Verocchio's workshop. He shared lodgings with Leonardo while he was working on the bronze figures for the Baptistry, for which he was ill paid and resolved, according to Vasari, not to work again on a public commission. Moreover, an echo of Leonardo's inspiration is unmistakable in the much-discussed and much-reviled wax bust of "Flora" in Berlin, ascribed to a circle of Leonardo and most probably to Rustici. At this time, Pomponius Gauricus, in De sculptura (1504), named him one of the principal sculptors of Tuscany, the peer of Benedetto da Maiano, Andrea Sansovino and Michelangelo. It may have been made in France, perhaps in the circle of Rustici, who entered Francis I's service in 1528.

Vasari tells of the elaborate suppers given by Rustici and his comrades.

Rustici's Mercury was commissioned by Cardinal Giuliano de' Medici in 1515 as a fountain figure for the courtyard of Palazzo Medici in Florence. The figure blew a jet of water that spun a whirligig with four vanes in the form of butterfly wings, according to Giorgio Vasari's description. According to James Draper, Rustici's figure drew inspiration from the mid-fifteenth century gilt-bronze fountain Winged Infant now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vasari praised the sculpture, now in the Boscawen collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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