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Revealed at last: Secret Jewish artist favoured by the Medici

Recent discovery of the truth about Jona Ostiglio has stunned historians and art experts alike

December 8, 2022 12:43
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3 min read

Jona Ostiglio broke all the rules. As a Jew in 17th-century Florence, he should have stayed confined to the city’s ghetto, and as a Jewish artist he shouldn’t have worked for the city’s most important families, including the rulers themselves, the Medicis.

And he certainly shouldn’t have become a member of Florence’s prestigious Academy of Fine Arts. But he did.

So the recent discovery of the truth about Ostiglio has stunned historians and art experts alike.

Jews were confined to the narrow constraints of the ghetto and the work they were allowed to do was strictly restricted. Yet Ostiglio had a successful career but then slid into oblivion.

Until, that is, Jewish historian Piergabriele Mancuso, who was researching the role of the Jewish community at the time of the Medici, came across a 1907 article by Italian rabbi Umberto Cassutto. It mentioned Jona Ostiglio, a Jewish artist working in 17th-century Florence. But where were his paintings?

Enter Maria Sframeli, an art historian from Florence’s Uffizi gallery. It turned out that decades earlier she had come across the name “Jona” while cataloguing some unattributed paintings stored in the gallery.

Mancuso’s inquiry about Ostiglio triggered that memory and soon she was able to find a number of works by the artist, one in a Medici villa, another in a Florence church, and even one in the Farnesina, the Italian foreign ministry.

Now it was up to Mancuso to find out more about the mysterious painter. The story he uncovered was astonishing.

Jona Ostiglio was born around 1620/30 and was active between 1660 and 1690. An Italkim, that is a member of the country’s indigenous Jewish community, he started to work as a painter in his 30s, a relatively late age, which is explained by the fact that, as a Jew, he was not allowed to be part of professional guilds and could not officially be apprenticed to any of the artist’s studios or botteghe.

Ostiglio was not the only Jewish artist in Florence, points out Mancuso; there were others, such as Moise del Castellazzo but what they produced was exclusively for internal Jewish use rather than the more general, and prestigious, Christian market.

Topics:

Art

Italy