Workshop of Rossello di Iacopo Franchi

Rossello di Iacopo was born to Iacopo del Rosso and his wife Caterina, probably in Florence, c. 1376. The first document we have regarding his career is dated 1397, when he enrolled in the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali, the physicians’ and spice merchants’ guild, as a painter. Throughout his life he lived with his younger brother Giunta, initially in Via de’ Cornacchini and then in Palazzo de’ Cerchi, where their families are later recorded as residing (Rossello was married twice, the second time to a sister of the painter Giovanni di Piero di Bartolo Landi). In 1430, the two brothers also began to rent a workshop, situated only a stone’s throw from their home.

Rossello’s first definite work, documented in 1408, was commissioned by Niccolò di Francesco Falcucci, a famous physician in the Florence of his day. A panel depicting St. Blaise, it was intended to grace one of the piers in Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence cathedral). From the outset, Rossello’s very first works – for instance, a polyptych depicting the Madonna and Child with Saints painted for the Collegiata in Empoli (inv. no. 17), a triptych depicting the Annunciation with Saints in the Museo Civico di Pistoia (inv. no. 26) and a triptych in the Strossmayerova Galerija in Zagreb (inv. no. 2) – reveal his predilection for the manner of Lorenzo Monaco and Lorenzo Ghiberti.

A slight change of style can be detected between the 1420s and ‘30s, when Rossello began to look at other artists, such as Masaccio. It was in these years that he painted a Crucifix for the church of San Michele a Rovezzano which once bore a date (1419 or 1424), worked on several illuminations for a gradual for the church of Santo Stefano in Prato (1429) and for an antiphonary for the Compagnia del Bigallo (1431), and signed a majestic polyptych depicting the Coronation of the Virgin for the church of Santa Maria al Sepolcro (Le Campora) which bears the partly preserved date “MCCCXX–”, a year that Talbert Peters ¹ has suggested identifying as 1425. And finally, in 1439, he signed a Coronation of the Virgin now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena (inv. no. 608).

Rossello’s career set out on a downward curve in the 1440s. His brother Giunta died c. 1442, and he himself began to work less. He was over seventy when he and Ventura di Moro were commissioned, in 1445, to decorate the façade of the Loggia del Bigallo with Stories from the Life of St. Peter Martyr, after it had been damaged by fire. Rossello worked on the task for two years, after which he is recorded in the cadastre of 1447 as ‘inactive’. Four years later, he lost his sight and his hands trembled so badly that the ailment prevented him from ever working again. He is thought to have dictated his last will and testament and to have died in 1456. He was buried in the Basilica of San Lorenzo.

1. C. Talbert Peters, Rossello di Jacopo Franchi: portrait of a Florentine printer, ca.1376-1456, doctoral thesis, Indiana University, 1981[↩]