A Pair of Bouquet of Colorful Flowers in Florentine Vases Both in Original Frame

Size with frame: 17 1/4" high x 13" wide (43.8 x 33 cm.)

A bouquet of colorful flowers in blue glass Florentine vases with gilt bronze mounts. A snail and two cherries are depicted on one painting and a bunch of cherries on the other. Both in their original blue-green marbleized period frames.

In the seventeenth century, the Narvaez family, originally from Cordova, moved to Florence, where Juan de Dios, the father of Ferdinando, married the daughter of Senator Baccio Martelli, of the notable Tuscan family, and had six children, four sons and two daughters, Ferdinando being the first born. A Grand Ducal page in his youth – a position for adolescents who performed duties at court for which a diplomat was too august and a servant too plebeian – Ferdinando later held public office, was a Knight of Santo Stefano, and married Alessandra Martellini, who would survive him until 1807, but by whom he would have no children. In fact, neither Ferdinando nor his siblings left issue and the Narvaez family died out in 1761.
Drawing was an integral part of an aristocrat’s education, and gentlemen with artistic talent commonly gave their finished works as gifts, as it seems was the case with Ferdinando. For example, this noble dilettante’s gift of a miniature depicting St. Joseph and the Christ Child, today in the Uffizi, is recorded on the verso with the inscription “Fatto dal Cav.re Ferdina.do Narvaez Paggio di Valigia di S.A.R. e donato al Seren. Gran Duca Cosimo III.” Ferdinando’s opus as a still life miniaturist is established with two other signed parchments, today also in the Uffizi, of flowers in vases – one of glass and the other of porcelain – which, in the early eighteenth century, were recorded in the collection of the Medici villa at Lappeggi, where Violante of Bavaria, the widow of the Gran Principe Ferdinando de’Medici, lived.