Francesco De' Rossi

Francesco De' Rossi was born in Florence in 1510. No exact birth date is documented in the sources consulted, only the year. He trained in Florentine workshops under Giuliano Bugiardini and the sculptor and painter Baccio Bandinelli before studying under Andrea del Sarto, one of the leading Florentine painters of the preceding generation, sometime before Andrea del Sarto's death in 1531.

Around 1530 to 1531 he entered the service of Cardinal Giovanni Salviati in Rome, and it is from this patron that he took the professional name by which he is chiefly known, Francesco Salviati. He is also recorded under the names Il Salviati, Francesco Rossi, and Cecchino del Salviati. Working principally between Florence and Rome, with recorded activity in Bologna and Venice as well, he produced altarpieces, portraits, and fresco decoration for churches, confraternities, and aristocratic households, though the available sources for this profile do not confirm the specifics of individual commissions beyond his general activity. He was a lifelong friend of Giorgio Vasari, who later wrote about him in the Lives of the Artists.

Francesco De' Rossi died in Rome on 11 November 1563. He was buried at the church of San Girolamo della Carita in Rome.

Francesco De' Rossi is treated in standard art-historical references, including the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani and museum catalogue entries at the Uffizi, the British Museum, and the Prado, as one of the principal Mannerist painters of his generation, notable for ambitious fresco decoration, inventive portraiture, and tapestry designs. Giorgio Vasari, his friend and near-contemporary biographer, is reported in secondary accounts to have praised his manner as among the finest of the Florentine painters of the age, though this profile does not reproduce that praise as an exact quotation because the precise original wording could not be independently confirmed from primary sources. Modern scholarship generally ranks him alongside figures such as Vasari and Bronzino in the mid-century Mannerist generation, while noting that he remains less thoroughly catalogued in the popular literature than either of those two names.

Francesco De' Rossi died more than four and a half centuries ago, so his market today exists entirely on the secondary and auction market rather than through any gallery or estate representation. Paintings and drawings attributed to him circulate under several catalogued names, including Francesco De' Rossi, Francesco Salviati, and Il Salviati, on the secondary market for Old Master works. As of 2026-07-16, no independently verifiable all-time auction record, with a confirmed work, price, currency, house, and sale date, could be established from the sources available for this profile, and none is reported here rather than estimated.

Because Francesco De' Rossi is a sixteenth-century painter with no catalogue raisonne and no living estate or representing gallery, attribution and authentication depend on museum curatorial expertise, connoisseurship, and documentary research rather than any certification body. His works also circulate under several names, Francesco Salviati, Il Salviati, Francesco Rossi, and Cecchino del Salviati, in addition to Francesco De' Rossi, and collectors and researchers should treat these as referring to the same artist rather than assume separate hands. Given the small and irregular supply of his work at auction, provenance history and institutional exhibition record carry unusually heavy weight in establishing both authenticity and value.