Francescuccio Ghissi

Italian painter. He was the leading 14th-century painter from the Marches after Allegretto Nuzi, with whom he collaborated. The overall pattern of his activity is unknown. Most of his surviving panels depict the Madonna of Humility. Frescoes in S Francesco in Sanseverino were recorded but are now lost. Between his earliest known work, the signed Madonna of Humility (1359; Fabriano, S Domenico), and the Madonna of Humility with an Angel (1374; Montegiorgio, S Andrea) his draughtsmanship and facial modelling became more assured and the design of the basic triangular group more elegant. Another example (Fermo, S Domenico) shows the richness of his decorative repertory in the painted cloth and in the elaborately foliated gold ground. Ghissi was influenced by Nuzi, but his works, with respect to the latter, are much more rigid and characteristically archaic, leading one to think of a more provincial and intensely devotional expression.

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