Puccio Di Simone

Italian painter, active in Florence around the middle of the fourteenth century. One of his early works, an Annunciation with two saints in the church of San Lorenzo in Florence, also betrays the influence of Giovanni da Milano. Puccio is first recorded as a painter in 1346 when his name was included in the records of the Arte dei Medici de Speziali, the guild of doctors, druggists and painters but he is known to have been active before then since his damaged frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella in Florence once bore the date of 1340. In the late 1340s he executed a polyptych (now dismembered) with the Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine in the centre, and representations of saints on the side panels. Some of the extant panels stand out for their lavish use of the same decorative arabesque motif which is also present in several late works by Bernardo Daddi and his shop and it is likely that the two artists were collaborating regularly by the early 1340s. In 1959 Puccio's oeuvre was significantly expanded when Roberto Longhi - to general acceptance from other scholars - identified him as the Master of the Fabriano Altarpiece, a sobriquet coined by Richard Offner after the Saint Anthony Abbot altarpiece in the Pinacoteca Civica in Fabriano which is dated 1353.

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