Lodovico Cardi Da Cigoli Biography | Poet

CIGOLI (or Civoli), LODOVICO CARDI DA (1559-1613), Italian painter, architect and poet, was born at Cigoli in Tuscany. Educated under Alessandro Allori and Santi di Tito, he formed a peculiar style by the study at Florence of Michelangelo, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto and Pontormo. Assimilating more of the second of these masters than of all the others, he laboured for some years with success; but the attacks of his enemies, and intense application to the production of a wax model of certain anatomical preparations, induced an alienation of mind which affected him for three years. At the end of this period he visited Lombardy, whence he returned to Florence. There he painted an “Ecce Homo,” in competition with Passignani and Caravaggio, which gained the prize. This work was afterwards taken by Bonaparte to the Louvre, and was restored to Florence in 1815. Other important pictures are—a “St Peter Healing the Lame Man,” in St Peter’s at Rome; a “Conversion of St Paul,” in the church of San Paolo fuori le Mura, and a “Story of Psyche,” in fresco, at the Villa Borghese; a “Martyrdom of Stephen,” which earned him the name of the Florentine Correggio, a “Venus and Satyr,” a “Sacrifice of Isaac,” a “Stigmata of St Francis,” at Florence. Cigoli, who was made a knight of Malta at the request of Pope Paul III., was a good and solid draughtsman and the possessor of a rich and harmonious palette. He died, it is said, of grief at the failure of his last fresco (in the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore), which is rendered ridiculous by an abuse of perspective.