Matteo di Pacino

Matteo di Pacino was a Florentine panel and fresco painter of the third quarter of the fourteenth century. No birth or death date survives in the documentary record. He is first documented in 1359 with his registration in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the guild that governed Florentine painters, and archival traces continue to 1394. Most scholars place his active career between about 1359 and 1374; some sources suggest, as a probability rather than a documented fact, that his career ended around 1374 in a further outbreak of plague.

For much of the modern era his paintings were attributed to an anonymous hand known as the Master of the Rinuccini Chapel, named for the fresco cycle in the Rinuccini Chapel of the Basilica di Santa Croce in Florence. The art historian Luciano Bellosi identified this painter as Matteo di Pacino, a reattribution now generally accepted in the scholarly literature. His style shows an early debt to Bernardo Daddi, then moves toward the more sober, stylized, and spiritual idiom associated with the circle of Andrea di Cione, known as Orcagna, in whose workshop he may have trained, though no apprenticeship contract has been found.

Works assigned to him include a panel from a dismembered polyptych for San Michele in Poggio, near Siena, now at the North Carolina Museum of Art; a triptych of the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saints at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and a panel of Christ Resurrected with the Virgin, John, and Mary Magdalene at the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg, Germany.

The defining event in the modern critical history of Matteo di Pacino is Luciano Bellosi's identification of him as the painter behind the Rinuccini Chapel frescoes, a reattribution that reorganized how museums and auction houses catalogue his surviving panels. Scholars generally place him in the stylistic lineage running from Bernardo Daddi through the Orcagna workshop and credit him with a distinct, if modest, degree of narrative invention within that tradition. A Sotheby's catalogue essay has praised his originality and narrative imagination, but the underlying source and named critic behind that phrasing could not be verified with confidence, so it is not quoted directly here. Broader critical attention to the artist remains limited to specialist Old Master scholarship rather than general art press.

Matteo di Pacino's market is small and infrequent, typical of a Trecento panel painter working outside the small circle of universally recognized Florentine names. His recorded auction high is USD 180,000, paid for an unidentified panel (lot 37) at Sotheby's New York on 25 January 2007; the work's exact title is not given in the accessible catalogue material. Two further results round out the known record: Saint Ivo with a Supplicating Donor sold for USD 151,200 at Sotheby's New York on 27 January 2023, and an unidentified panel (lot 12) made USD 62,500 at Sotheby's New York on 22 May 2019. No gallery or estate represents the artist today; individual panels surface periodically through the Old Master departments of Sotheby's and Christie's and through specialist dealers such as Nicholas Hall.

Matteo di Pacino belongs to the Old Master category of collecting, where value depends heavily on connoisseurship rather than on brand recognition or recent market momentum. No catalogue raisonne exists, and the attribution history of his corpus, including decades spent catalogued only as an anonymous "Master," means that provenance and expert opinion carry more weight than they would for a documented modern career. Auction activity is sparse, with only a handful of confirmed results spanning 2007 to 2023 and a top price of USD 180,000, so any purchase should be weighed against the specific panel's condition, publication history, and attribution consensus rather than against a broader price trend.