Maso da San Friano

1531 – 1571

Maso da San Friano (Tommaso d'Antonio Manzuoli) was an Italian painter. He received his initial training from either Pier Francesco Foschi or Carlo Portelli. The style of his earliest known work, the signed and dated Portrait of Two Architects (1556; Rome, Palazzo Venezia), suggests Foschi. By 1560 Maso's reputation was such that he received two important commissions for altarpieces. For the de' Pesci Chapel in San Pier Maggiore, Florence, he painted a Visitation (1560; Cambridge, Trinity Hall), revealing his intense fascination with the art of Andrea del Sarto. In its High Renaissance compositional structure and grandeur of movement, the work pays homage to del Sarto's large altarpieces, such as the Passerini Assumption of the Virgin (1526; Florence, Pitti). Maso's Virgin and Child with Saints (Cortona, Convento della Trinità) is primarily a simplification and abstraction of works by del Sarto, whose influence is particularly evident in the male saints, but it also contains elements from the works of Foschi (the faces of the women) and Jacopo Pontormo, particularly the cursive, pliant figure of Mary Magdalene.

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