Giovanni Toscani

In 1423 the church of Santa Trinita in Florence held two commissions a few steps apart. The banker Palla Strozzi, one of the richest men in the city, was paying Gentile da Fabriano for the glittering Adoration of the Magi now in the Uffizi. Nearby, the marriage of his niece Caterina into the Ardinghelli family helped pay for the decoration of their chapel, dedicated to Saint Nicholas. The painter of that chapel was Giovanni di Francesco Toscani.

For decades his work was known only under an invented name, the Master of the Griggs Crucifixion, after a panel once owned by the American collector Maitland Griggs. In 1966 the historian Luciano Bellosi linked that group to the surviving fresco fragments in the Ardinghelli chapel, and the payment records of 1423 and 1424 gave the hand its real name. In his tax return of 1427 Toscani described himself as a cofanaio, a painter of chests, and painted wedding chests are among the works now attributed to him.

The Accademia holds a predella panel from his Ardinghelli altarpiece, with Saint Francis receiving the stigmata beside a miracle of Saint Nicholas. The altarpiece was broken up in the 18th century, pieces of it are now in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and in 2021 the Accademia acquired two of its pinnacles, the angel and the Virgin of an Annunciation.