SIMONE DEI CROCEFISSI
Simone dei Crocefissi (also known as Simone di Filippo) was an Italian painter, active in Bologna. He belonged to the school of Vitale da Bologna. In the later fourteenth century several painters left Bologna for other centres and were more or less absorbed into the patterns of their adopted territories. Simone dei Crocefissi is the most important and prolific of the panel painters who maintained the Bolognese tradition in Bologna, and the clear colours of his fundamentally calm art link him closely to the miniaturists, the predominant artists among the painters in Bologna.
Simone was the son of a Bolognese cobbler and was almost certainly the pupil of Jacopo di Scannabecchi di Dalmasio, who married his sister in 1350. Simone was already a master painter when first recorded in 1355, probably living opposite San Domenico, Bologna, in the house that he extended in 1365.
He ran a leading workshop in Bologna and produced many devotional works in the 1380s, possibly with collaborators or assistants, an example being the Triptych of the Crucifixion (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford).
