Il Maestro Di Borgo Alla Collina: Proposte Per Scolaio Di Giovanni Pittore Tardogotico Fiorentino

The Master of Borgo alla Collina, a late Gothic painter active at the end of the XIV till the third decade of the XV in Florence and Tuscany, finally has a name: it is Scolaio di Giovanni, artist who was known only by documents, but without works. Through the archival investigation Alberto Lenza has been able to identify the anonymous Master and find unpublished documents about his life, career, collaborators, and about the history of his works. All the results of this investigation are published in the first monograph about this painter. Scolaio, probably a scholar of Agnolo Gaddi, was not a simple follower or a imitator of Gherardo Starnina, as the art historians said in the past, but he worked with this Master in the same workshop in a company and he spread his style till the Twenties when he was influenced by the new art of the Renaissance. He mostly made paintings for private devotions but also altarpieces for important Florentine families of that time. All his works are collected in a catalogue that has 50 numbers and lots of unpublished works, all of them well illustrated with many pictures. Mina Gregori in the introduction writes that this is an invaluable text for the study not only of this artist, but also of Stamina and of the International Gothic in Florence and Tuscany.