A notarial document of 1507 names him as a member of another confraternity, the Compagnia di San Girolamo, called il Ciottolino, which met ‘below the church of Santa Maria sopr’Arno’.
It was common for out-of-work craftsmen to moonlight as bombardiers (well-known examples include Raffaello da Montelupo and Zanobi Lastricati), though it was generally the province of masters in the more physically demanding arts, such as cannon-founders, sculptors, and scalpellini.
In all likelihood, the skills of mixing and manipulating gunpowder to create his fuochi d’artificio turned out to be easily transferable to the job of an artilleryman when there was not enough painting work to stave the wolf from the door.
The substantial fine that the artist was sentenced to pay to the court (in addition to what he owed the plaintiffs) implies that Nunziata was also being punished for some kind of misdeed, though its nature is not made clear by the magistrates’ decree.
On nearly every other occasion in which the word fantoccio or one of its cognates appears in the Lives, Vasari uses it as a term of deprecation to signify a crudely sketched figure, a daub, a work reminiscent of a child's doodles.
Thus Vasari uses the term fantoccio to describes Tribolo’s selection to replace the earlier, inept designers of the Florentine fireworks displays (girandole) for the feast of San Giovanni as: ‘certi fantocciai, che avevano già molt’anni fatto…mille gofferie’.
In fact, Vasari says that candle painters were so widely known for their crude handiwork ‘che hanno dato il nome ai dipintori plebei (onde si dice alle cattive pitture “fantocci da ceri”)’.
But the term could also be applied dismissively to the artistic productions of the Middle Ages: ‘quei fantocci e quelle goffezze che nelle cose vecchie ancora oggi appariscono’.
Another patron, disgusted by artists who seemed capable only of making pictures that were inducements to lust (cose lascive), asked Nunziata to paint him a Madonna who was honourable, visibly old, and not of the sort to incite impure thoughts.
It is certainly true that the anecdote of the bearded Madonna, in particular, has much in common with a story told about the thirteenth-century painter Cimabue by Vasari's Florentine contemporary, Anton Francesco Grazzini, known as Il Lasca.
By the mid-sixteenth century, Cimabue had come to be popularly identified as a crude and inept painter, supposedly blind from birth or with such visual impairment that his eyes could be described as ‘lined with cloth’ (‘fodrati di panno’).
In Lasca's Comento sopra il Capitolo della salciccia, the author relates that once when Cimabue painted Mary Magdalen in the desert, he decided to give her a beard in order to make her look particularly old and haggard.
In Lasca's anecdote, unlike Vasari's, the joke does not hinge on Sacchetti-like mockery of an ignorant layman; the point of the story is the artist's playfulness, embracing the absurd by dreaming up unexpected juxtapositions of iconographic elements.
The work won Ridolfo great renown, Vasari continues, on account of the lifelike portraits it contained of three painters who were his friends: Poggino Poggini, Giovanni d’Anton Francesco Guidi (called Scheggia), and Nunziata.
Most of the heads in the Christ Carrying the Cross are in fact stock types or borrowings from earlier works of art, such as the helmeted soldier at the centre of the composition whose screaming face betrays the inspiration of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari.
The date of Nunziata’s death, known to the nineteenth-century archivist Gaetano Milanesi (who did not cite a specific documentary source for his information), has now been confirmed by the record of his burial, which took place in Santa Trinita (the church of the parish in which he had been born) on 13 April 1525.
The census of Florentine men available to bear arms, drawn up some in 1527, identifies Nunziata’s former home as less than a block away from Santa Trinita, in the via del Parione that runs along the church’s northern flank.