Giovanna Fratellini

Giovanna Fratellini (1666–1731) was a Florentine artist during the Baroque period. Born in Florence as Giovanna Marrmocchini Cortesi, she married Guiliano Fratellini in 1685 and changed her name to Fratellini. This well-born woman pastellist was a lady-in-waiting to Vittoria della Rovere, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany.

Training Fratellini was trained in painting and music under the ducal auspices, before which she trained with Livio Mehus and Pietro Dandini. Her works consist of oil, pastel, miniature enamel and chalk. She is primarily renowned for her portrait works but she also painted fables, bacchanals and historical subjects, such as the Death of Lucretia (untraced).

After training in the art of miniature painting with the Capuchin painter Ippolito Galantini (1627–1706) and pastels with the noted Domenico Tempesti (c.1655–1737), she polished her skills with Anton Domenico Gabbiani. Her works depicted a model of both noble and virtuous eighteenth-century refinement. Fratellini's signature elements, fluttering ribbons, are spryly worn. In the painting, she can be seen working on a portrait of her son Lorenzo Fratellini, features a segment on Giovanna Fratellini as an example of women artists teaching other women in Baroque Florence. The television special, which spotlights the thousands of works by women in storage in Florence's museums, including many of Fratellini's pastels and portraiture, reveals the ‘creative ties and artistic succession between artists Giovanna Fratellini, Violante Siries Cerroti and Anna Bacherini Piattoli.'