Spinello Aretino

Giorgio Vasari, who came from the same town of Arezzo and wrote the first real history of Italian art, told a strange story about Spinello Aretino's death. Late in life Spinello painted a fresco of the fall of the rebel angels and gave Lucifer such a hideous face that, Vasari says, the devil came to him in a dream and demanded to know where the painter had ever seen him looking so foul. Spinello woke in terror and, the story goes, never fully recovered. It is almost certainly a legend, and it fits a painter remembered for vivid, forceful storytelling.

The real work backs the reputation up. In the 1380s, after his home town of Arezzo was sacked, Spinello moved to Florence and covered the sacristy of San Miniato al Monte, the hilltop church above the city, with 16 scenes from the life of Saint Benedict, brisk and clear in the solid tradition of Giotto, the father of Florentine painting. He also frescoed the town hall of Siena with the deeds of a medieval pope.

Much of his earlier work around Arezzo has perished. He trained his son Parri Spinelli, who carried the family manner into the next generation, and died back in Arezzo in 1410.