Equestrian Monument to Ferdinando I de' Medici

Tacca joined Giambologna's atelier in 1592. He took over the workshop of his master on the elder sculptor's death in 1608, finishing a number of Giambologna's incomplete projects, and succeeding him almost immediately as court sculptor to the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany.

Tacca began by finishing Giambologna's equestrian bronze of Ferdinand de' Medici for the Piazza della Santissima Annunziata, a project in which he had participated at every stage, from the terracotta models to the casting process in the fall of 1602 and the finishing (by 1608). This work was cast with the bronze from the cannons of captured Barbary and Ottoman galleys, taken by the Order of Saint Stephen, of which the Grand Duke Ferdinando I de' Medici was Grand Master.

Though it functions as a counter-attraction to Giovanni da Bologna's monument to Cosimo I, the monument to Ferdinando proposes his son in a guise of peacemaker, thanks to the adoption of a mount that appeared to his contemporaries to be "tamer" than his father's.