Michele Tosini

Michele Tosini was born in Florence on 18 May 1503. He trained first in the workshops of Lorenzo di Credi and Antonio del Ceraiolo before moving into the studio of Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, from whom he took the name by which he was known for most of his career. Vasari reported that Tosini was known by no other name than Michele di Ridolfo, reflecting how completely his early identity was bound to his master's workshop. When Ridolfo Ghirlandaio died, Tosini inherited the workshop and continued to run it in Florence.

Tosini built a substantial career on religious commissions, portraiture, and mythological subjects, including versions of Leda and Venus that survive in major collections. He worked alongside Giorgio Vasari on large decorative commissions for the Medici court, including the ceilings of the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. He continued working in Florence until his death there on 7 November 1577.

His paintings were sometimes reassigned to better-known contemporaries in later centuries; a Madonna and Child now attributed to him and held by the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College was catalogued as a work by Andrea del Sarto when it entered the museum's collection in 1963, before the art historian Heidi Hornik reattributed it to Tosini, a pattern that illustrates both the closeness of his style to his more famous peers and the ongoing work of connoisseurship in sorting his oeuvre from theirs.

Historical and museum sources treat Tosini as Ridolfo Ghirlandaio's principal pupil and successor rather than as an independent stylistic innovator, a framing that goes back to Vasari himself. Modern museum notes, including those from the National Gallery in London and the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College, consistently describe him within this workshop lineage while crediting him with a distinct body of religious and mythological paintings and a role in Vasari's Palazzo Vecchio decorations. The recurring critical thread is one of quality close enough to his Mannerist peers that individual works have, at times, been mistaken for paintings by Andrea del Sarto, a confusion that has only been untangled through later archival and stylistic research.

Tosini's auction market is small and largely confined to the Old Master specialist trade rather than the contemporary evening-sale circuit. Public price databases show recurring but modest results, including a Lempertz sale of Venus and Cupid for 62,000 euros including premium, and MutualArt records roughly 84 works by Tosini that have come to auction, with paintings reaching as high as 336,000 US dollars. The specific sale behind that 336,000 dollar figure, including the work's title, the auction house, and the sale date, is not independently confirmed in the sources available for this profile, so it should be treated as the best-documented high point rather than a fully verified record.

Because so few Tosini paintings trade in public view, individual results are heavily influenced by attribution confidence, subject matter, and condition rather than any smooth market trend, and each new sale can meaningfully shift where his "record" sits.

There is no catalogue raisonne of Tosini's work, so attribution and authentication depend on connoisseurship, provenance, and comparison to securely documented paintings in institutions such as the Galleria Borghese, the National Gallery, and the McMullen Museum of Art. Because works by Tosini have historically been confused with paintings by Andrea del Sarto and other Florentine contemporaries, provenance research and current scholarly opinion matter more than they would for an artist with a settled, fully published oeuvre. His auction market is thin and the reported high price should be read with the caveat that key sale details are not fully independently verified, so collectors should treat any single result as a data point rather than a stable benchmark.