Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli

Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli was born in Florence around 1450, the cousin of the better-known painter Cosimo Rosselli. He entered the workshop of the Florentine painter Neri di Bicci around 1460, likely as a young teenager, learning the panel and fresco techniques standard to a mid-Quattrocento Florentine bottega.

His documented career runs largely through commissions rather than an exhibition record in the modern sense. In 1484 he painted a Madonna della Cintola with Saints for the church of San Piero a Sieve in the Mugello, a panel now held by the Princeton University Art Museum. Between 1488 and 1490 he worked on the decoration of the Sala dei Signori, known today as the Sala dei Gigli, in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. In 1497 he supplied an altarpiece, Madonna and Child with Four Saints, for the church of San Matteo in Terrossola near Bibbiena. In 1499 he was paid for work on the altarpiece of the Rucellai chapel in San Pancrazio, Florence; the precise nature of that commission is not fully documented in the sources consulted. In 1502 he painted a fresco of the Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian for the Oratorio della Compagnia di San Sebastiano near Fiesole. A gold-ground panel of Sant'Ivo attributed to him, dated to roughly 1470 to 1480, is held by the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Florence.

Scholars describe his style as tending toward archaic, medievalizing forms with a heavy reliance on gold ground, a tendency that has led some to speculate, without documentary confirmation, that he may have traveled to Rome. He died in Florence around 1526; no source consulted gives an exact day or month of death.

No verbatim critical assessment of Rosselli from a named critic in a major outlet could be located in the available sources, so none is quoted here. What scholarship exists tends to treat him as a secondary figure relative to his more celebrated cousin Cosimo Rosselli, valued chiefly for a handful of securely documented commissions, including the Palazzo Vecchio decorations and the Princeton Madonna della Cintola, and for stylistic traits, an archaic sensibility and heavy use of gold ground, that place him within the conservative wing of late Quattrocento Florentine painting rather than at its innovative center.

No verified realized auction price for Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli has been identified as of 2026-07-16, and independent research turned up no auction database or press listing of a public sale for this name. Old Master dealers specializing in Italian Renaissance painting have at times catalogued cassone or devotional panels under his name, but this reflects the ordinary attribution work of the trade rather than a documented public sale record. Given the five-century gap since his death and the fact that most known works sit in museum and church collections, a modern price history for this artist is effectively absent from public sources.

This is not an artist with an active, price-discoverable market. There is no catalogue raisonne, no confirmed auction record, and no current gallery or estate representation to consult, since he died in Florence roughly five hundred years ago and his surviving output sits mainly in museums and churches. Any panel offered under his name in the trade, including cassone fronts of the kind Old Master dealers have attributed to him, should be evaluated on connoisseurship and provenance research specific to that object, not on any pattern of past sales, because no reliable pattern of past sales currently exists in public sources.