MASTER OF THE BRACCIOLINI CHAPEL (ACTIVE PISTOIA, CIRCA 1390-1425)

We are grateful to Larry Kanter for proposing an attribution on the basis of photographs to the Master of the Bracciolini Chapel, a Pistoiese painter active at the end of the fourteenth and in the early fifteenth centuries. The artist takes his name from a cycle of frescoes in San Francesco al Prato, Pistoia, depicting the Marriage and Death of the Virgin, the Conversion of Saint Paul, and the Glorification of Saint Augustine; the Madonna’s facial profile in the present work bears a striking similarity to the head of a Franciscan monk in one of the fresco’s quatrefoils. The date of the cycle is undocumented, but has been theorised by scholars to have been executed circa 1430 (G. Brunetti, ‘Gli affreschi della cappella Bracciolini in San Francesco a Pistoia’, Rivista d’arte, XVII, 1935, pp. 221-44).

The master’s aesthetic bears the hallmarks of the Florentine Agnolo Gaddi’s work, in whose workshop he may have trained, and whose innovations he appears to have assimilated. More locally, he may have worked under Giovanni di Bartolomeo Cristiani, who evidently trained in Pistoia but also shows the influence of masters from late trecento Florence, including Niccolò di Tommaso, who himself worked in Pistoia, and Nardo di Cione. Our understanding of the Master of the Bracciolini Chapel's position within the context of late Gothic Tuscan painting was significantly expanded by Andrea G. de Marchi in an article of 1992 (A. G. de Marchi, ‘Il Maestro della Cappella Bracciolini e l’avvio del Tardogotico a Pistoia’, Storia dell’Arte, LXXIV, 1992, pp. 5-24).