Jacopo da Empoli


Jacopo da Empoli, also known as Jacopo Chimenti, was an Italian Florentine Reformist painter.

Biography

On 30 April 1551, Jacopo was born in Florence as Jacopo Chimenti; he later became known after Empoli, the birthplace of his father.
Jacopo worked mostly in his native city. He apprenticed under Maso da San Friano. Like his contemporary in Counter-Maniera, Santi di Tito, he moved into a style often more crisp, less contorted, and less crowded than mannerist predecessors like Vasari. He collaborated with Alessandro Tiarini in some projects.
Jacopo's younger brother, Domenico Chimenti, born in Empoli, was also a painter.
Jacopo took on many pupils, including Felice Ficherelli, Giovanni Battista Brazzè, Giovanni Battista Vanni, and Virgilio Zaballi.
After the 1620s, working in a thematic often shunned by Florentine painters, Jacopo completed a series of exceptional still-life paintings.
On 30 September 1640, at the age of 89, Jacopo died.

Stereogram controversy

Around 1600, Jacopo created a pair of drawings that seem to show the same figure from two different vantage points, such as the left and right eyes of an observer. In 1859, the images were rediscovered by Alexander Crum Brown, who suggested that they were intended to create a stereoscopic image.
The drawings might have been done to complete a commission for Giambattista della Porta to be used in a book on optical illusions called De refractione optices parte libri novem.
Precise measurements of the drawings have been made that demonstrate that the pair of drawings are not perfectly stereoscopic, with significant parts actually pseudoscopic, implying that any stereoscopic effects were accidental.

Selected works