GIOTTESCHI. — Up to the beginning of this century, this term designated more or less all the Florentine painters of the fourteenth century. Today, with the progress of scholarship, the term has become restricted to the collaborators and followers of Giotto active between the end of the thirteenth century and the middle of the fourteenth.
Among the painters of the older generation, who graft Giottesque elements onto archaizing experiences and are sometimes called “paragiotteschi,” apart from the almost legendary Buffalmacco, the MAESTRO DELLA S. CECILIA (named after the eponymous panel in the Uffizi) stands out for his freshness. He collaborated on the Assisi cycle, executing the last three scenes and, from a design by Giotto, the first. Inferior to him is PACINO DI BUONAGUIDA, whose style is meticulous and miniature-like.
The exquisite MAESTRO DI FIGLINE is partly dependent on the Maestro della S. Cecilia; among other works, he painted the Assunta in S. Croce, often attributed to Giotto. In the lower church at Assisi, during the first decade of the fourteenth century, worked the MAESTRO DELLE VELE, whose mediocre Franciscan allegories long usurped Giotto’s name, and other anonymous artists, among whom the supposed STEFANO excels, the author of the Storie di S. Stanislao, already wholly imbued with Sienese colourism. From Stefano descend, on the one hand, the great MASO DI BANCO, and on the other, the probable GIOTTINO (Stefano’s son), that is, the author of the splendid Pietà of S. Remigio in the Uffizi and perhaps of an Assunta (destroyed in the last war) in the camposanto of Pisa and of frescoes
