PUCCINELLI, Angelo

Italian painter, who seems to have spent most of his life in Lucca. What is known of his career is found in church records; many of his altarpieces, sculptures, and paintings have disappeared. He first appeared in these records in 1380, when he restored and painted a statue for Siena’s cathedral. By 1382 he was in Lucca, where he signed an altarpiece, now lost, for a local church. He was last mentioned in 1407 in Lucca, where he was to make a mural painting of the Madonna and Child with Saints.

Puccinelli combined innovation - vigorous, monumental figures - with tradition - decorative gold backgrounds marked by elaborate, punched patterns. The bodies of his figures display a hard linearity. Perhaps inspired by such artists as Luca di Tommè, Puccinelli enlarged his figures to fill the field. The physical presence and solid three-dimensionality of his figures was unusual among the Tuscan painters of his day.

Puccinelli was rediscovered by scholars only in the twentieth century.