Born in Florence, Gabbiani first apprenticed with the Medici court portrait painter Justus Sustermans, then with the Florentine Vincenzo Dandini; subsequently moved to Rome in 1673, where he studied under the Medici-sponsored Accademia Fiorentina, led by Ciro Ferri and Ercole Ferrata.

His pupils included Giovanna Fratellini, Ignazio Enrico Hugford (also a biographer), Benedetto Luti,[1][3] Pietro Marchesini of Pistoia,[4] Ranieri del Pace, Giovanni Battista, Tommaso Redi, and his brother Gaetano Gabbiani.

The Salone was so named because it encased a Meridian line (a metal strip along floor and wall) with which one could make annotations of solar time, by noting where a beam of sunlight pointed at high noon.

When the frescoes were painted, the Palazzina rooms were part of the mezzanine apartment of Grand-prince Ferdinando de' Medici, son of the Grand Duke Cosimo III and child-pupil of Vicenzo Viviani.

For the Sala Meridiana, Gabbiani adopted a panoramic ceiling similar to both Cortona’s apotheotic frescoes in Palazzo Barberini and in the Sal di Marte in the Pitti itself.

The iconography is complex, and was described by his Gabbiani’s pupil Hugford as Time raising up Arts and Sciences to the temple of glory and trampling Ignorance.