Assumption of the Virgin

religious

Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci was a monk of the Camaldolese monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli. He was a widely famed painter and miniaturist whose work was particularly favoured by Lorenzo de Medici (1449-1492), the Florentine statesman and patron of arts and letters known as Lorenzo the Magnificent. With Don Lorenzo Monaco and Don Simone Camaldolese, Gherarducci made up the most important late medieval school of Florentine painters, and enriched Florentine art with a new decorative colour harmony.

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About the Artist

Don Silvestro dei Gherarducci

1339 – 1399

Italian illuminator. He joined the Camaldolese order at the monastery of Santa Maria degli Angeli, Florence in 1348 at the tender age of nine. He professed his vows at the age of thirteen, after a four-year novitiate. He became Prior in 1398. The importance of the scriptorium was noted by Vasari in his Vita of Lorenzo Monaco; the latter's entry into the monastery in 1391 completed a triumvirate of painters, Don Silvestro, the eldest painter in the group, Don Simone Camaldolese and Don Lorenzo, that constituted the most important late medieval school of painters in Florence. Based on the evidence of his mature paintings, it seems very likely that his career before 1362 was not centred upon Santa Maria degli Angeli in Florence but upon Siena, where he might have been trained as a painter in Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio's workshop.

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