Pseudo Pierfrancesco Fiorentino

Pseudo Pier Francesco Fiorentino, Madonna of the Roses, Washington, National Gallery of Art

Pseudo Pierfrancesco Fiorentino was an Italian painter active in Florence in the 15th Century.

Bernard Berenson was the first to put togheter a discrete number of them under the name of Pier Francesco Fiorentino, known above all for the altarpieces and frescoes he had scattered in the last three decades of the 15th century in the Pisa area and along the Valdelsa, in which a style akin to that of the Marian anconettes emerged.4 The priest-painter, thus defined in signatures and documentary occurrences, was therefore an ideal candidate precisely because of his sharp, polished drawing, his pale, faded palette, and the now anachronistic profusion of gold, which was certainly due to the traditional taste of his patrons.5 Even the sharp physiognomies of his figures, flushed in the cheeks and with punctiform eyes circled by swollen eyelids, showed not inconsiderable similarities, to the point of flatly convincing us of the goodness of Berensonian references. In 1928, Berenson's pupil Frederick Mason Perkins realised, however, that the supposed in- ternal coherence of the grouping, which soon numbered almost two hundred pieces, was in reality undermined by subtle but obvious formal discrasies. Therefore, he proposed to remove all Lippes' and Pesellino's Madonnas with Child from Pier Francesco's monumental works, to which no less than a dozen works (both paintings on wood and frescoes) belonged, and to refer them to one or more anonymous personalities of different culture and training, to be designated by prefixing Piero's name with the prefix by which our painter is known. Accepted closely by Berenson himself, the term 'Pseudo Pier Francesco Fiorentino', although still in vogue, has, however, over the years been joined and sometimes preferred, especially recently, by that of 'Imitators of Filippo Lippi and Pesellino', coined by Federico Zeri in 1958. As Megan Holmes' research has demonstrated with abundant data, it is estimated that in around 160 panels that are firmly attributed to the 'Pseudo' group, at least 64 different figures recur in a practically infinite series of combinations, the majority of which were taken from the œuvre of Filippo Lippi and Pesellino. In particular, large-format works by the former were widely imitated, including the Adoration of the Child once on the altar of the Medici Palace chapel and now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the so-called Annalena Altarpiece in the Uffizi and the Annunciation in the Doria Pamphili Gallery. 4), the Pratt Madonna from the Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio, as well as the Aynard Madonna in the Musée des Beux-Arts in Lyon.

Bibliography

• B. Berenson, 'Pictures of the Renaissance', Oxford 1932, pp. 449-450
• N. Pons, in 'Pittori attivi in Toscana dal Trecento al Settecento', Firenze 2001, pp. 106-109
• F. M. Perkins, 'Nuovi appunti sulla Galleria Belle Arti di Siena' in 'La Balzana', n.s., II, 1928, pp. 183 - 203; p. 189.
• F. Zeri, 'Italian Painters in the Walters Art Gallery', Baltimore, 1976, vol. II, pp. 80 - 85.

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