Taddeo Gaddi, the most important of Giotto's scholars, was born in 1300, and was held at the baptismal font by Giotto himself. Gaddi rather went back on earlier traditions and faults. His excellence lay in his purity and simplicity of feeling. His finest pictures are from the life of the Virgin, in S. Croce, Florence. He was, like his master, a great architect as well as painter. He furnished the plans for the Ponte Vecchio and Campanile, Florence, after Giotto's death. He was possessed of great activity and industry. He is supposed to have died in 1366, and rests in the scene of his labours, since he was buried in the cloisters of S. Croce.
Fra Filippo, 1412-1469, a Carmelite friar. The romantic, scandalous life, including his slavery in Barbary, attributed to him by Vasari, the great biographer of the early Italian painters, has received no corroboration from modern researches. It is rather refuted. He always signed his pictures 'Frater Filippus,' and his death is entered in the register of the Carmine convent as that of 'Frater Filippus.' In all probability he was from first to last a monk, and not a disreputable one. He describes himself as the poorest friar in Florence, with six marriageable nieces dependent on him, and he is said to have been involved in debt.
His colouring was 'golden and broad,' in anticipation of that of Titian; his draperies were fine. He was wanting in the ideal, but full of human feeling, which was apt to get rude and boisterous; his angels were 'like great high-spirited boys.' Withal, his style of composition was stately. Among the best examples of his work are scenes from the life of St John the Baptist in frescoes in the choir of the Duomo at Prato. His panel pictures are rather numerous. There are two lunette[49] pictures by Fra Filippo in the National Gallery.
Benozzo Gozzoli, 1424-1496, a scholar of Fra Angelico, but resembling him only in light and cheerful colouring. He is said to have been the first Italian painter smitten with the beauty of the natural world. He was the first to create rich landscape backgrounds, and he enlivened his landscapes with animals. He displayed a fine fancy for architectural effects, introducing into his pictures open porticoes, arcades, balconies, and galleries. He liked to have subsidiary groups and circles of spectators about his principal figures. In these groups he introduced portraits of his contemporaries, true to nature and full of expression and delicate feeling. His best work is in the Campo Santo, Pisa, scenes from the history of the Old Testament, ranging from Noah to the Queen of Sheba. The Pisans were so pleased with his work as to present him, in 1478, with a sarcophagus intended to contain his remains when they should be deposited in the Campo Santo. He survived the gift eighteen years, dying in 1496. His easel pictures are rare, and do not offer good representations of the master. There is one in the National Gallery--a Virgin and Child, with saints and angels.