Marco Marchetti known as Marco da Faenza

We know nothing of Marco Marchetti’s formative years, some scholars mooting an apprenticeship with Jacopone Bertucci, others arguing against that suggestion and proposing, instead, a period of training in Rome in the company of the painters and decorators working on projects commissioned by the papacy. What is certain, at any rate, is that Marchetti is known to have been in Rome in 1551, 1553 and 1560. In 1555 he began to cooperate with Giorgio Vasari on the decoration of Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, working on the project for roughly a decade and even earning praise from Vasari in his Lives of the Artists. From 1560 on Marchetti began to divide his time between Rome and Florence, also returning frequently to Faenza where he worked both as a fresco painter and as a painter of altarpieces. He is recorded in Rimini in 1570, where he decorated the ceiling of the hall in Palazzo Marcheselli and painted a number of altarpieces. He was then summoned to Rome to decorate the Loggias of Pope Gregory XIII in the Vatican, his last great commission for the papacy. In the final decade of his life Marchetti returned to work in his the city of his birth, where he died on 13 August 1588.