Workshop of Baldassarre degli Embriachi

Baldassarre degli Embriachi was born some time in the 1330s to a Florentine family, the Obriachi or Ubriachi, though he spent his early youth in the papal city of Avignon. He returned to Florence, his native city, in 1368, and enrolled in the Arte del Cambio, the moneychangers’ guild, engaging in numerous business ventures in the years thereafter. After selling the Emperor Charles IV some pearls for the Empress in 1369, he was awarded the title of Count Palatine. In those same years, he regularly travelled to Venice, where his business interests were putting down roots. After the Ciompi uprising in Florence, he rose in rank in the Guelph and popular party. He suddenly pops up that same year in English documents relating to trade with King Richard II, in whose service he spent two years. On his return to Florence, he had the Signoria recognise his children’s legitimacy, he bought numerous pieces of land and he married his daughter off, thus forging a family bond with such leading Florentine families as the Capponi. During these years in Florence, he set up a workshop in which he is unlikely to have personally worked as a sculptor but rather as an “art entrepreneur” who entrusted the execution of the work commissioned from him to Giovanni di Jacopo, a sculptor who had been active since the 1360s.

In 1393 he moved to Venice, where a branch of his family had already settled, and himself became a Venetian citizen two years later, fleeing charges from the Republic of Florence regarding his ties with Gian Galeazzo Visconti, Duke of Milan (these were the years in which the Duchy of Milan was at loggerheads with Florence over the Duke’s territorial ambitions in Tuscany).

From 1398, Baldassarre appears to have been ceaselessly on the move: in eight years, he visited Lombardy, France, Catalonia, Spain and Portugal, and his customers included not only the Emperor Charles IV and King Richard II of England, but also Jean de Valois, Duc de Berry, and King Martin I of Aragon.

Baldassarre’s workshop chiefly produced wedding caskets, triptychs for private devotion and altarpieces (albeit the latter only on demand). Only two of his works can be dated with certainty, both made for the Visconti and intended for the Certosa di Pavia: two caskets, now reassembled to form a cabinet, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. no. 17.190.490); and a triptych now in the sacristy of the Certosa, dated February 1400.

He updated his will in 1406, and probably died while travelling from Venice to Rome (Giovanni di Jacopo also died in those same years, at an unspecified moment some time between 1401 and 1406). The workshop carried on doing business after his death, until c. 1433.