Born in Bologna in 1580, Cosimo Merlini settled in Florence certainly
sometime before 1617, when documents mention his participation as the
principal artist in the realisation of the altar frontal of St. Carlo
Borromeo in gold, the most important project of goldsmithery of the
time. Commissioned by Cosimo II for the Saint's altar in Milan, today
only the central panel in closely fitted hard stone showing the Grand
Duke at prayer has survived (Silver Museum, Florence). This lost work
(it was completed in 1624), was the masterpiece that was to procure him
the admiration of his contemporaries and the favour of the Medici
Court, in whose service he remained for the rest of his life.
Registered with the Guild in Por Santa Maria in 1622, he lived in the
quarter of Santo Spirito and ran his goldsmith's workshop on the Ponte
Vecchio with his brother Pietro Paolo.
Although this artist is mentioned in a great many documents, only a
very few works are actually attributed to him with certainty, in spite
of the fact that he played a leading part in the Florence of Cosimo II
and Ferdinando II, deeply influencing the art of goldsmithery in
Tuscany in the first half of the 17th century. The Reliquary-cross of
the Passion, dated 1620 (Museum of the Opera del Duomo, Florence) and
the Reliquary urn of St. Mark the Pope, St. Amato the Abbot and the
Martyr Concordia of 1622, which form part of the Treasure of San
Lorenzo (Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence), also date from the same
period as the execution of the golden altar frontal. Little is known of his activity for the Grand Ducal Wardrobe between
1625 to 1630, though he appears above all to have been busy on a series
of smaller objects in gold-work, also for private commissions, from
1630 up until the date of Cosimo's death.
In 1634 he helped carry out the silver altar frontal for the altar of
the Madonna in the Basilica of Impruneta and also created the gilded
bronze grille worked à jour, with a Latin cross and covered with the
symbols of the Passion, in the centre (1637), for the Chapel of the
Virgin in the same church. The artist also made the silver pyx that
repeated a similar iconographic design to the one above and was one of
the few objects that he ever signed (Museum of Religious Art,
Impruneta). The chalice that Merlini carried out for the Church of San
Pietro at Luco di Mugello, still conserved there, is also signed as
well as dated (1637), and very like the pyx of Santa Maria at Impruneta
in style. The goldsmith's later work reveals his progressive tendency
to transfer the formal inventions belonging to late Mannerism to the
more modern Baroque style. Among his later works to have survived to
this day we can find the pectoral cross and the crosier carried out on
a commission from the Archbishop Pietro Niccolini for the Florentine
Chapter between 1636 and 1638.
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