( fl 1356–89). Italian painter. He was listed with his contemporaries Paolo di Giovanni Fei and Bartolo di Fredi in Sienese civic records of 1356 and is continually recorded in the city until after 1389. He was probably dead by 1391. Francesco’s only signed work dates from his maturity, and there is no agreed body of early work. The small triptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints, the Annunciation and the Crucifixion (Siena, Pin. N., 183), often but not universally attributed to an early phase of his development, suggests some contact with such painters as the Ovile Master and Naddo Ceccarelli. The elongated figures also broadly recall Paolo di Giovanni Fei and other painters of the mid-century. But stylistic affinities between this triptych and the signed and dated double-sided processional image, with the Virgin and Child with Saints on one side and the Crucifixion and Saints on the other (1380; Berlin, Gemäldegal.), are hardly overwhelming. The style of the Berlin Crucifixion suggests a connection with a more overtly expressive area of the Sienese tradition and with the late style of Simone Martini in particular. The intense twisting figures of St John in the Berlin panel and in another Crucifixion (ex-Kaulbach Col., Munich) clearly recall the Joseph of Simone’s Christ Returning from the Temple (Liverpool, Walker A.G.) or the standing figures of the frontispiece to Petrarch’s edition of Virgil (Milan, Bib. Ambrosiana). The beetle-browed and distinctly fleshy faces of Francesco’s figures, expressive almost to the point of caricature, may ultimately derive from such models as the mourning women of Simone’s Entombment (Berlin, Gemäldegal.) or the figures in the Master of the Codex of St George’s panels. The composition of the Annunciation on a diptych with an Annunciation and Two Donors and the Assumption (Cambridge, Girton Coll.) derives directly from Simone.

• Francesco di Vannuccio
  • Paolo di Giovanni Fei