Active in: Italy

Biography

Despite evidence of her considerable success as a professional artist in Florence, little is known about the painter Violante Ferroni. Baptismal records report her birth in Florence in 1720 and she is listed as a painter in the membership records for the Accademia delle Arti del Designo in 1736. Membership was typically awarded at mid-career and it was unusual for an artist as young as sixteen to be elected. She studied with Vincenzo Meucci (1694–1766) and Violante Cerrotti (1709–1783).

In 1740, Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri (d. 1742), the Florentine collector and scholar who headed the Accademia from 1730 to 1740, included Ferroni in a compilation of biographies of living artists. Gabburri wrote that she was a student of Giovanni Domenico Ferretti (1692–1768) and that she had extraordinary skill with oil painting, “Florence has reason to hope that she, in time, will get better and better at painting, especially because she is so enamored of art that she never gets tired of improving her technique.” There is little documentation of her life and career after the publication of this biographical sketch in 1740. In 1756, she completed the first of two large-format oval paintings commissioned to adorn a new expansion of the San Giovanni di Dio Hospital in Florence. Each eight by nearly twelve feet in dimension, the paintings depict Saint John of God ministering to plague victims and distributing bread to the poor. Both paintings were conserved by Advancing Women Artists in 2020.

Ferroni continued to paint, exhibiting works at the Academy of San Luca and the Uffizi. She was listed in the membership rolls of the Accademia in 1762 and she exhibited at the Accademia di San Luca in 1776, but no later record of her in Florence has been recovered. Her death date is thought to be around 1780 but the final decades of her life remain a mystery.

Selected Works