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Museum of Fucecchio
Four works by Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani compared for the first time
 The painting, brought to our attention in 1962 by Federico Zeri, present in the 1996 exhibition L’Officina della Maniera in Florence, has been attributed by Waldman, thanks to his detailed archival researches, to Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani, the biographical identity for the anonymous author of the “Kress Landscapes”. The scene of the Nativity is inserted in an ample and precise architecture, perfectly foreshortened. The chromatic richness, even more enhanced by a recent restoration, and the truly remarkable modulations of chiaroscuro, are outstanding. These stress the powerful pictorial style, which is at times, quick and concise in the stroke, but extremely refined in the execution of some details. A good example of this is Saint Michael’s cuirass and Saint Clements’s papal tiara.
 These two panels dated 1526, from the Parish Church of Santo Stefano a Montopoli were probably destined to frame a venerated image already present in the church. They represent, together with the Fucecchio Altarpiece (1521-23), the only dated works in the whole of Larciani’s activity. The Lunette with God the Father and the classical architecture, which creates the backdrop to the scene, are similar to the Fucecchio Altarpiece. There are various references to contemporaneous Florentine painting (Andrea del Sarto, Mariotto Albertinelli, etc.); but reinterpreted by Larciani in a personal and lively synthesis, with his peculiar, eccentric vision and very refined, pictorial touch
 The Holy Family in the Borghese Gallery and the Madonna and Child now in the National Gallery in Arezzo, represent two variations of a common composition. The central groups of the Virgin and Child are almost identical, and they relate closely to a drawing by Francesco Granacci. Many stylistic and iconographic connections exist between Larciani’s works and the later output of Granacci’s workshop, a fact which suggests that Larciani spent part of his career as a collaborator in the older master’s workshop. The compact, sculptural massing and violent torsion of Larciani’s figures recall the pictorial language which had recently been evolving in the early paintings of Michelangelo and Rosso Fiorentino. The Arezzo Madonna and Child are alone in a wild and rocky landscape, characterized by Leonardesque outcroppings of stone which separate the figures in the foreground from the city and valley which extend behind them. Such an inhospitable backdrop lends poignancy to the tightly-knit composition, in which the Child is shown clambering into the lap of his mother, while already resting his head between her breasts.
 In the Borghese painting instead, Larciani has set the group on a sort of piazza in front of a very generalized architectural structure, which opens onto a window-like vista of verdant and lushly painted landscape at the right-hand side of the picture. Here, in the middle distance, a sinuous figure of St. Joseph supports a figure of the young St. John the Baptist, whose gaze and gesture seem to be directed toward the Child and, despite his marginal position in the composition, his impassioned glance and outstretched arm form an emotional link with the central group which telescopes the ambiguous spatial construction, imbuing this small devotional work with an intense spiritual energy.
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