Pietra dura is a decorative art form that uses carefully cut pieces of coloured stone to create patterns and images. It was developed to a high level in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Florence by the Grand Ducal Workshops, supported by the Medici family, where craftsmen worked with the natural colours and veining of different stones. The result is a distinctive and detailed form of decoration that remains closely associated with Florence.

The present panel belongs to a group of 18th-century Florentine pietra dura depictions of the Annunciation, inspired by the celebrated fresco in the Basilica della Santissima Annunziata atribute to a Friar Bartolomeo. These works appear to derive from a pietra dura and gilt-bronze prototype commissioned by Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642-1723) for Margravine Sibylla Augusta of Baden-Baden (1675–1733) and designed by the court sculptor Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1725), from which the Grand Ducal workshops produced several panels as personal gifts (Giusti, 2006, loc. cit.). A comparative pietra dura plaque of the Annunciation is in the State Hermitage Museum (inv. no. E-26). A further plaque, signed by Bacio Cappelli and in the Museo dell'Opificio delle Pietre Dure presents medallions with figures closely related to those in the present plaque (illustrated A. Giusti, P. Mazzoni, A. Martelli, Il Museo dell'Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Milan, 1978, fig. 164). Fascinatingly, a very rare watercolour prototype for this scene exists in the Archivio dell'Opificio delle Pietre Dure (illustrated A. Giusti, Pietre Dure Hardstone in Furniture and Decorations, London, 1992, p. 289, fig. 112.).

THE GRAND DUCAL WORKSHOPS
The Medici passion for hardstones and intarsia began under Cosimo I Medici (1519-1574) who acquired numerous works in pietra dura from Rome, the centre of lapidary production in the 16th century. While there were artisans of pietra dura in and around Florence from around 1550, it was only under Cosimo’s sons Francesco I (1541-1587) and Fernando I de Medici (1539-1609) that Florence was able to compete with and eventually exceed the output of the Eternal City. Fernando I founded the Grand Ducal pietre dure manufactory, known as the ‘Galleria dei Lavori’, in 1588. The workshops would provide works of art in hardstones and porphyry not only for Grand Ducal commissions but also for foreign princes and collectors and from its early stages it distinguished itself from the Roman lapidaries for its varied production and particularly its specialism in scenes uniting nature, art and science. While Florentine pietra dura utilised stones occurring naturally in Tuscany, such as pietra paesina and Alberese, the workshops also imported valuable and costly stones from across Italy and Europe, including Sicilian jasper, Bohemian agate and black marble from Flanders. Plaques to be incorporated into cabinets, caskets, clocks, tabletops and panels for display produced by the Florentine workshops depicted complex images including birds, vases of flowers, landscapes, narrative scenes and trophies which differed from the geometric patterns favoured in Rome. The Grand Ducal Workshops attracted skilled artisans and designers from across Italy and Europe including gem-cutters from Milan and cabinetmakers from Germany and the Low Countries. Superintendents of the Galleria dei Lavori included celebrated draughtsmen and designers like Jacopo Ligozzi (1547-1627) and Giovanni Battista Foggini (1652-1725), the latter who, under the auspices of Cosimo III (1670-1723), originated rich baroque designs often incorporating flowers and birds on black paragone grounds, the culmination of which can be considered the famous Badminton Cabinet. The death of Gian Gastone (d. 1737), the last Medici Grand Duke did not spell the end of the Grand Ducal Workshops but from the mid-18th century the baroque repertoire of the manufactory, now under Habsburg control, was exchanged for realistic figures and landscapes based closely on formal paintings by artists like Giuseppe Zocchi (fl. 1750-67) and eventually for neoclassical compositions with the approach of the 19th century, by which point the workshops were known as the Opificio delle pietre dure, the name it retains to this day.