Details

Name

Francesco di Stefano

Brief Biography

1422–57, Italian

Occupation

Painter

Description

The Florentine painter Francesco di Stefano, known as Pesellino, is recorded as an assistant of Fra Filippo Lippi ( about 1406–69) in the 1440s, and stylistically he was to remain dependent on his master’s example. His only large-scale work is the Trinity altarpiece (National Gallery, London), commissioned in 1455 by the Company of Priests for their church in Pistoia, but left incomplete when he died two years later. The majority of Pesellino’s known works consist rather of cassone panels, and especially of modestly scaled devotional pictures, apparently produced in collaboration with other painters, such as Piero di Lorenzo di Pratese and Zanobi di Migliore, with whom he entered into a business partnership in 1453. Pesellino’s most popular Madonna compositions often survive in numerous versions, and in the past these have been attributed to a master dubbed by Berenson (1932) ‘the Pseudo Pier Francesco Fiorentino’. This group of pictures has nothing, however, to do with the late fifteenth-century painter Pier Francesco Fiorentino (1444/45–after 1497), nor are they even by a single hand. Zeri (1971) accordingly renamed the group the ‘Lippi-Pesellino Imitators’. Apart from their mechanical re-use of figures and motifs derived from Lippi and Pesellino, the pictures in the group are characterized by solid craftsmanship, a strong decorative sense, and a plentiful use of punched and incised gold leaf.