Creative Partners: The Marriage of Laura Battiferra and Bartolomeo Ammannati*
From the time of their courtship until death parted them forty years later, Bartolomeo Ammannati (1511-1592) and Laura Battiferra (1523-1589) nurtured a loving relationship with reciprocal support for complementary careers. Their childless union generated two bodies of art, vast and beautiful. Renaissance contemporaries esteemed the Ammannati as a rarity, creative peers in a close marriage, but history has indifferently divorced them, dropping Bartolomeo to the ranks of second best and pushing his accomplished wife into obscurity. Reunited, the couple can return as they deserve, in the entwined lives that enriched their joint corpus and enhanced the fame each won as an individual — she for her poetry, praised by the most prominent men and women of culture in Counter Reformation Italy; he in his dual activity as sculptor and architect for projects ordered by popes in Rome, leaders of the new Society of Jesus, and three generations of Medici rulers in Florence.