• Cigoli was an Italian painter and architect.
• Lodovico Cardi was born at Villa Castelvecchio in Cigoli, Tuscany.
• Cigoli trained in Florence under the mannerist Alessandro Allori.
• Later he was influenced by the most prominent of the "Counter-Maniera" painters, Santi di Tito, as well as by Barocci.
• For the Roman patron, Massimo Massimi, he painted an Ecce Homo (now in Palazzo Pitti).
• He then gained the employ of the Grand-Duke in some works for the Pitti Palace.
• Shortly before his death, Cigoli was made a Knight of Malta at the request of Pope Paul V.
• As stated by the prominent 17th-century painter, Andrea Sacchi, Cigoli's, St Peter Healing the Lame Man came to be recognized as the third most beautiful painting in Rome after Raphael's Transfiguration and Domenichino's The Last Communion of St Jerome.
• Cigoli, a close personal friend of Galileo Galilei, painted a last fresco in the dome of the Pauline chapel of the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, depicting the Madonna standing upon a pock-marked lunar orb.
• This is the first extant example of Galileo's discoveries about the physical nature of the Moon (as he himself drew it in his 1610 treatise Sidereus Nuncius) having penetrated the visual arts practice of his day.
• Until this image, the Moon in pictures of the Virgin had always been mythical and smooth, perfectly spherical as described by Platonic & Ptolemaic tradition.
• His pupils include Cristofano Allori, the Fleming Giovanni Biliverti,
Domenico Fetti, Giovanni Antonio Lelli, Aurelio Lomi, Pietro Medici, Gregorio Pagani, and Andrea Comodi.
