Granacci was a great friend and admirer of Michelangelo, who he first
met while training at the school of Ghirlandaio. Later they studied
together at the art school in the garden of St. Marks. He long remained
faithful to the late 15th styles he had absorbed in this stage of his
apprenticeship and, as he frequently tended to repeat similar details
and compositional ideas in his work, the biography Vasari wrote about
him is thus a fundamental source for putting his artistic activity in
chronological order. All the works Vasari mentions can be identified
though it is possible to attribute certain dates to only a few.
His
youthful works, influenced by Filippino Lippi, include the Madonna
enthroned between the Sts. Michael and John the Baptist (Staatliche
Museen, Berlin), the Adoration of the Child in Honolulu (Academy of
Art) and four Stories of St. John the Baptist (divided between New
York, Liverpool and Cleveland), probably carried out to decorate a room
in a Florentine palace, all of them characterised by a lively narrative
vein, typical of the late 15th century.
In 1508 he was called to Rome,
with other artists, to help transfer the cartoons onto the ceiling of
the Sistine Chapel. On his return to Florence he painted the Madonna and Child between Sts.
Francis and Jerome for the Convent of the Augustinians in San Gallo
(Academy Gallery, Florence), and the Madonna of the Girdle for the
Company of St. Benedict Bigi. In 1515 he collaborated in carrying out
the decorations in the city for Pope Leo X's visit to Florence and, in
the same period, he painted the Stories of St. Joseph on a commission
from Francesco Bogherini, today divided between the Museums of the
Uffizi and Palazzo Davanzati in Florence.
The Madonna and Child and St. John as a youth in the Museum of Western
and Eastern Art in Odessa, dated 1519, permits a definition of
Granacci's style when he had reached his full maturity as an artist. In
this period he started to abandon his earlier 15th century models and
began to express a more complex idea of space and the movement of
figures. Some works that are dated roughly between 1520 and 1525
clearly show the direct influence of the school of Fra Bartolomeo;
among them, the Madonna enthroned between St. Sebastian and St. Francis
at Castefiorentino and the Holy Conversation at Montemurlo. Perugino,
instead, inspired the altarpiece of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary
and four Saints at the Academy Gallery in Florence, carried out
sometime in around the 1530's. Only a few fragments remain of the
altarpiece for the Convent of Sant'Apollonia, which, according to
Vasari, was carried out on a design supplied by Michelangelo himself.
His Stories of the Annunciation and Stories of the Holy Martyrs in the
predella are characterised by a swift and fluid technique and lively
expression.
The painting of the Entrance of Charles VIII into Florence (Uffizi,
Florence), dating from around 1527, and the Martyrdom of the ten
thousand martyrs in the Church of San Simone, again in Florence, both
show the confident and spirited style that belongs to his later years.
Granacci's Mannerist experiences led him towards new solutions,
noticeable in particular in his smaller works, while the style in his
larger paintings always remained fairly classical.
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