Jacopo del Sellaio (1441/2–1493), was an Italian painter of the ahead of time Renaissance, active in his original Florence. His genuine name was Jacopo di Arcangelo. He worked in an eclectic style based on those of Botticelli, Filippino Lippi, and Domenico Ghirlandaio. The nickname Sellaio derives from the profession of his father, a saddle maker.
According to Vasari, Sellaio was a pupil of Fra Filippo Lippi. In Lippi’s workshop he would have met Sandro Botticelli, who had a lasting influence on Sellaio’s work. Sellaio associated the Florentine painters’ confraternity the Compagnia di San Luca in 1460. In 1472 he was sharing a workshop subsequently Biagio d’Antonio, and in 1473 he formed a partnership taking into account Filippo di Giuliano that he maintained until his death in 1493. A painter named Zanobi di Giovanni is documented in the workshop in 1490. Neither Filippo nor Zanobi’s extant works have been identified, but the former is sometimes identified in the song of the anonymous painter known as the Master of the Fiesole Epiphany.
Today Sellaio is best known for paintings from the fronts of cassoni, or wedding chests. These often depict stories from ancient mythology, Roman history, or the Bible. His most well-known such commission is the Morelli and Nerli pair of 1472 (now London, Courtauld Institute Gallery), manufactured by the carpenter Zanobi di Domenico and painted by Sellaio in collaboration when Biagio d’Antonio. Sellaio’s three panels bearing in mind the Story of Esther, now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, also belonged to a pair of cassoni along afterward two extra panels now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest and the Louvre, Paris.
Sellaio produced a large number of religious panels, including many of the Saint Jerome and Saint John the Baptist. His altarpieces enhance two panels of the Annunciation for Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli, Florence, painted in 1473; a Pietà commissioned in 1483 for the chapel of the Compagnia di San Frediano detta della Brucciata in the Florentine church of San Frediano (later at the Royal Museum in Berlin and destroyed in 1945); and a Crucifixion painted not far and wide off from 1490, also for San Frediano and now in the church of seventeenth-century church of San Frediano in Cestello.
Sellaio’s son, Arcangelo (1477/78-1531), was in addition to a painter, and was formerly known as the Master of the Miller Tondo.
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