Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli

Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli was born in Florence, most commonly dated to around 1445, the younger brother of the painter Cosimo Rosselli. No school, degree, or year-by-year record of his training survives. Art historians infer that he trained as an illuminator, possibly in the circle of Francesco di Antonio del Cherico, based on stylistic closeness between their miniatures. His earliest secure record is a 1470 payment for three historiated initials in a Gradual for Siena Cathedral.

By the 1480s Rosselli had shifted his focus to engraving and cartography, establishing a Florentine print workshop that produced maps, city views, and art prints, including the celebrated panoramic view of Florence known as the Pianta della Catena. He is recorded at the court of Matthias Corvinus in Buda from around 1480 and later worked in Venice, where the historian Marino Sanudo is credited with praising him as one of the most influential artists of his time. He produced a signed world planisphere in 1506 and continued to work on maps into the following years. His last securely dated document is from 1508, and he no longer appears in a 1528 inventory, which scholars treat as the latest possible boundary for his death. Standard reference sources place his death in Florence before or around 1513, though no exact date has been documented, and this profile treats that year as an approximate boundary rather than a confirmed date.

Modern scholarship treats Rosselli as a pivotal figure in the early history of printmaking and cartography rather than as a painter in the first rank. The EVE research project at the Universidade NOVA de Lisboa describes him as a leading figure in engraving, printing, and the map trade in Florence and Venice during the Renaissance, and notes that the Venetian chronicler Marino Sanudo regarded him as among the most influential artists of his generation. He is also credited with an early innovation in oval-projection world mapping. No exact, attributable quotations from named critics in major contemporary outlets could be confirmed in current sources, so none are reproduced here.

Rosselli's market is that of a documented but rarely traded Old Master: paintings, drawings, and prints attributed to him surface infrequently, mostly through specialist Old Master auctions and dealer catalogues rather than a continuous secondary market. The highest price found in current sources is EUR 138,000 (roughly USD 188,000 at the time), paid at Lempertz in Cologne on 4 December 2013 for The Resurrection of Christ, a panel restituted to the heirs of the collector Jacques Goudstikker and reattributed to Rosselli from his brother Cosimo by the scholar Federico Zeri. No higher realized price for the artist could be confirmed in current sources.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli, and attribution of paintings and drawings depends on archival documentation and connoisseurship rather than a single authenticating body; the reattribution of a Lempertz panel from his brother Cosimo is a useful example of how fluid these attributions can be. He is not represented by any contemporary gallery or estate, since he worked more than five centuries ago, and his market presence is confined to occasional Old Master and works-on-paper sales. Buyers should also be alert to naming variants, Francesco Rosselli, Francesco di Lorenzo Rosselli, and Francesco di Lorenzo Roselli all refer to the same artist, and should take care not to confuse his output with that of his brother Cosimo Rosselli, whose paintings appear at auction under a very similar name.