Meliore di Jacopo
1201–1285 · Medieval Italian painter from Florence
Meliore di Jacopo (documented between 1255 and 1285) was a medieval Italian painter active in Florence, a transitional figure between Byzantine-influenced painting and the innovations that would come with Cimabue and Giotto. His first certain record dates from 1260, when he appears as "Megliore dipintore" in a list of Florentine citizens who fought at the Battle of Montaperti.
His early works, dated roughly between 1250 and 1260, include a Madonna and Child from a church in Panzano (Greve in Chianti), the so-called Stoclet Madonna in the Adolphe Stoclet collection, and a Madonna and Child at the Art Institute of Chicago. They show the influence of the geometric stylization of the Master of the Bigallo Crucifix. Around 1271 he signed and dated an altarpiece now in the Uffizi, depicting Christ, the Virgin, Saints Peter, Paul and John the Evangelist, a stylistic shift reminiscent of Cimabue.
In his last works, after 1280, the Madonna and Child in Montefioralle shows innovations introduced by Giotto. Other works have been tentatively attributed to him, and part of the mosaic decoration of the dome of the Florence Baptistery, made between 1260 and 1275, may also be his. For a time many of his paintings were attributed to the "Master of Bagnano"; Roberto Longhi reassigned some to him, and the rest are now thought to be the work of his apprentices.