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.

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The painter's signature

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.

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A Ostiglia work

Ostiglio alone managed to breach the ghetto walls: he was commissioned by important Florentine families such as the Mannelli as well as the Medici.

To top it all, in 1680 he became a member of the prestigious Academy of Fine Arts, which officially should not have happened. No other Jew would receive the accolade for several centuries.

Ostiglio worked in the bottega of a well-known Florentine painter, Onorio Marinari, and specialised in still lifes and landscapes in the style of Salvador Rosa and Caravaggio. He wasn’t terribly good at the human form so the figures in his paintings were done by others.

“In these botteghe, especially those of very famous artists, it was customary for other people, including disciples and apprentices, to contribute to the same work,” explains Mancuso.

“Jona’s ‘inability’ to make human figures can be seen as a weak point, but also as the most significant piece of evidence that he was fully integrated into the Florentine art scene.”
Had Ostiglio not been Jewish, would art historians still be very excited by this discovery?

Not as much, admits Mancuso. He probably would be another “normal” painter who was highly valued by the Medici court and whose previously unattributed work was now given a name. However, Mancuso points out, Ostiglio’s Jewishness is not a marginal element.

“The ‘normality’ of his works is seismic news. Painters were meant to please the commissioners — who were not Jewish.” In the bottega Ostiglio was not a Jewish artist, just an artist like the others.

Ostiglio’s success hints at a man full of resources and the little we know, so far, about his personal life confirms that. According to Mancuso’s research, he originally lived in the ghetto with his brother’s family but then probably went to live outside with a wealthy Christian widow — which was forbidden, of course. But then, Ostiglio didn’t exactly abide by the rules of his time.

Florence under the Medici was probably not as oppressive as some other Italian cities. For Mancuso, the Medici were neither particularly tolerant or intolerant: they followed the anti-Jewish mainstream and what really mattered for them was their political and economic interests.

But they did truly care about the arts and Ostiglio’s success is testament to his talent as an artist, in spite of his race.