MASOLINO da PANCALE. — Painter, born to a Cristofano Fini in 1383 at Panicale di Valdelsa near Empoli (Florence) or at Valdarno near S. Giovanni (Arezzo), appears in the death register of S. Maria del Fiore in Florence on 18 Oct. 1440 or 1447. In 1403 and 1407 he is among the assistants of the Ghibetti on the second door of the Baptistery, and on 18 Jan. 1423 he is enrolled in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries.
In 1424 (2 Nov.), he receives payment for the frescoes of the chapel of S. Elena in S. Stefano in Empoli; on 8 July 1425 he is noted in Florence for a modest work for the Compagnia di S. Agnese delle Laudi; he then departs to serve Pippo Spano in Hungary, where
he is still found in 1427 after the death of the Florentine condottiere; on 1 Nov. 1432 he is paid in Todi for a fresco in S. Fortunato; in 1435 he executes the frescoes of the Baptistery of Castiglione Olona, where, in an unspecified year, he left his name in a *Nativity*, better in an *Adoration of the Child* (*MUSOLINUS DE FLORENTIA PINSIT*), part of a cycle in the vault of the collegiate church, which is the starting point for reconstructing Masolino’s personality. Trained in sculpture within the current of idealized medieval classicism and, perhaps later, introduced to painting by Starnina (Vasari), in his first surviving work: the *Madonna of Humility* in the Kunsthalle in Bremen (1423), he reveals himself as a late Gothic artist, yet a creator of delicate figures full of graceful human cordiality, far removed from the wooden and transcendent figures of Lorenzo Monaco, with a soft chiaroscuro of diffused luminosity. He appears congenial to Gentile da Fabriano and especially to Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino (with whom Masolino’s works suggest certain contacts), both in Florence at the beginning of the third decade of the century. The same tendencies, with a more developed formalism, recur in the *Madonna of the Milk* in the Pinacoteca in Munich, and in S. Stefano in Empoli in the fragmentary frescoes of the chapel of the Cross, in those of the transept as well as in the lunette with the *Virgin and Child between Two Angels*. Of more assured model and deeper expressive value is the