Andrea di Giusto Manzini

Andrea di Giusto was born in Florence around 1400. He is recorded as a garzone, or apprentice, in the workshop of Bicci di Lorenzo in Florence through 1424, absorbing the ornamental, gold-ground vocabulary of the late Gothic tradition. By 1426 or 1427 he had moved to Pisa to assist Masaccio on the predella of the great altarpiece Masaccio painted for the church of the Carmine, one of the founding works of Renaissance perspective and naturalism. He spent the following two decades producing altarpieces for churches in and around Florence, including a signed and dated Madonna della Cintola for Santa Margherita in Cortona (1437, now in the Galleria dell'Accademia, Florence), a triptych for Prato (1435), the Trittico Serristori for Sant'Andrea a Ripalta in Figline Valdarno (1436), and frescoes attributed to him in the Cappella dell'Assunta of Prato Cathedral. He was the father of the painter Giusto d'Andrea.

The surname Manzini, by which he is sometimes called, was reported in the nineteenth century by the scholar Gaetano Milanesi but has never been confirmed in archival documents, even though it continues to appear in museum records, including at the Walters Art Museum and the Statens Museum for Kunst. He died in Florence, though sources disagree on the exact date. Wikipedia gives 2 September 1450, Treccani's Dizionario Biografico reports Milanesi's date of 2 December 1450, and other Treccani entries give 1455 instead; documentary evidence confirms only that he was dead by 1457. The exact death date cannot be stated with certainty from the sources available.

Standard reference works place Andrea di Giusto as a transitional figure, a painter of modest independent stature whose importance lies chiefly in his documented workshop connections. Treccani's Enciclopedia Italiana describes him as oscillating between competing tendencies of his period, while noting that his Assumption in the Galleria dell'Accademia follows closely in the manner of Fra Angelico. No verbatim, attributable critical quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed in the available sources, so none is reproduced here. The consistent thread across scholarship is that his individual hand is judged secondary to his position between the Bicci di Lorenzo workshop and Masaccio's circle, a lineage that gives his surviving panels historical interest beyond their purely artistic merit.

Andrea di Giusto Manzini's market is a small, sporadic Old Master category rather than a continuous contemporary market. The highest documented price on record is GBP 55,250, paid for The Madonna and Child with two Angels at Christie's London on 3 December 2008. The same painting resold for less at Koller in Zurich on 23 September 2016, for CHF 55,000, illustrating how volatile results can be for the same object across a single decade. A Praying Angel sold at Sotheby's New York on 5 June 2008 for USD 15,000. No higher public sale has been identified in the sources available through mid-2026.

There is no catalogue raisonne for this artist, and attribution depends on connoisseurship and comparison with the small number of securely documented and dated commissions, above all the 1437 Cortona altarpiece. The surname Manzini adds a layer of naming complexity that collectors and researchers should track carefully, since it appears in some major museum records but has no confirmed archival source. Public sales are infrequent and results have varied significantly even for the same painting sold twice within a decade, so any individual auction result should be read against condition, documentation, and prevailing Old Master demand rather than treated as a stable benchmark. Most known works of quality are already held by museums in Florence, Paris, St Petersburg, Copenhagen, and Baltimore, meaning that new material entering the market is inherently scarce.