Nunziata d'Antonio

Nunziato d'Antonio di Domenico, known as Nunziata (1468–1525) was an Italian painter, fireworks artist, and bombardier of Renaissance Florence. None of Nunziata’s works can be identified today. Most of what we know about him comes from a single passage by Giorgio Vasari, in the 1568 edition of the Vite, within the Life of Ridolfo, David, and Benedetto Ghirlandaio. Too young to have known Nunziata personally, Vasari shaped him into a literary character: the joking painter in the tradition of Franco Sacchetti's novelle about Giotto and the fabled Buffalmacco. Nunziata belonged to the class of plebeian artists, and Vasari generally omitted their works. His story represents a part of Florentine art outside Vasari's canon, that became art history’s. His son Antonio, also a painter, left to work in England in 1519, and as Anthony Toto became court artist or Serjeant Painter to Henry VIII and Edward VI.

Nunziata's life and career are very sparsely documented. By 1499 we know that Nunziata had joined the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine artists’ confraternity. The artist was also listed in the Compagnia’s membership book of 1503-5, the so-called Libro rosso. In 1515 he was paid for painting a cross in SS. Annunziata, in preparation for the consecration of the church by Leo X. A notarial document of 1507 that names him as a member of another confraternity, the Compagnia di San Girolamo, called il Ciottolino, which met ‘below the church of Santa Maria sopr’Arno’. In 1512, the deliberations of the Florentine Signoria reveal that Nunziata and his friend Ridolfo Ghirlandaio were then working—alongside the painters Francesco di Niccolò Dolzemele, Jacopo di Francesco di Domenico, Bastiano di Bartolomeo Mazzanti, and Piero di Giorgio—on the decoration of the Palazzo Vecchio. Nunziata was paid in August of that year for painting nine coats of arms on the new windows that looked out over the dogana or customs-office.

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