( fl c. 1315–35). Italian painter. Identified in the 20th century and at first named the Master of Terenzano (Berenson), this painter is now named after a polyptych (c. 1320s) that originally stood in the Medici Chapel of Santa Croce in Florence. Its panels of half-length saints are now separated and occupy a secondary position as pinnacles for the altarpiece on the high altar of the same church. In his own day the artist must have held a respectable, if modest, position, forming part of a line of painters descended from the St Cecilia Master and Pacino di Bonaguida, whose work, although influenced by Giotto’s, stands in contrast to it. Although the painters of the so-called ‘miniaturist tendency’ (Offner) excelled at manuscript illustration, the Master of the Cappella Medici Polyptych is known only through a dozen panels, which include larger objects of some importance, for instance a Crucifix (Stuttgart, Staatsgal., 2635), as well as such small devotional works as the Virgin and Child Enthroned with Four Saints (Detroit, MI, Inst. A.), once the centre of a portable triptych. The limited evidence of these works perhaps fails to show his full range and talent but indicates that he was probably trained in Pacino’s workshop during the second decade of the century. The Master’s sweet, timid and doll-like figures reveal a kinship with the younger, more prolific and more important Master of the Dominican Effigies, with whom he was initially confused and may have collaborated. His debt to Giotto is evident in, for example, a Crucifixion (New York, Wildenstein’s) and Virgin Enthroned (Raleigh, NC Mus. A.), and from the 1320s the influence of Jacopo del Casentino and Bernardo Daddi can be seen also in such work as his Virgin and Child from the central panel of the Medici Chapel polyptych (in situ) and the Virgin and Child tabernacle (U. Würzburg, Wagner-Mus., 88). Unlike Bernardo, however, he was less successful in bridging the gap between a training that emphasized small-scale painting and the more monumental style of Giotto.

Part of the Masters, anonymous, and monogrammists family