Biography

Italian painter. A pupil of Andrea del Sarto, he appears to have worked independently from around the time of Andrea del Sarto's death in 1530 and to have specialized at first in devotional works of moderate size. In such paintings as the Virgin in the Clouds (Berlin, Staatliche Museen), the Holy Family (New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) and the Virgin and Child (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi) he imposed a Michelangelesque monumentality and sculptural density on figure compositions that are reminiscent of the warm intimacy of Andrea del Sarto's Holy Families. This early style culminates in the Virgin and Child with Sts John the Baptist and Elizabeth (Washington, National Gallery of Art), the largest of his Florentine paintings in which the prominent figure of the Virgin in a rose-red gown dominates the sober domestic scene.

Conte's independent works include the frescos in the Roman church, San Giovanni dei Fiorentini (Saint John of the Florentines). Some of the work was based on drawings by Perino del Vaga, and completed in collaboration with his Mannerist contemporary, Girolamo Siciolante da Sermoneta. His other fresco works were executed for the Roman church San Luigi dei Francesi. His painting from the Sant'Ambrogio basilica in Florence, Madonna and Child with Saint John, now hangs in the Uffizi Gallery. Conte's works similar in style to the latter piece include, Virgin in the Clouds and Holy Family. He also painted the large-scale Virgin and Child with Saint Elizabeth and John the Baptist, (1535) in Florence. These later, independent works were also influenced by Andrea del Sarto's other pupil, Pontormo, with the forms of figures even more elongated than Andrea's Mannerism.

As documented by the Renaissance biographer, Giorgio Vasari, Conte had painted a portrait of Michelangelo in Rome around 1540. He also painted the Portrait of Bindo Altoviti, a banker, around 1550, now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.