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Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Pietro Lorenzetti. Sienese painters, brothers. They were among the outstanding Italian artists of their time, but their lives are poorly documented—it is possible that both died in the Black Death of 1348. Pietro is usually said to have been the elder brother, but the evidence is not conclusive. His first dated work is a polyptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints (1320) in the Pieve di S. Maria at Arezzo; Ambrogio's earliest reliably attributed work is of a year earlier—a Virgin and Child for a church at Vico l'Abate (Museo Diocesano, Florence). Apart from collaborating in a cycle on the life of Mary, which they painted in fresco on the façade of Siena's public hospital in 1335 (now lost), the brothers worked independently.

Text source: The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (Oxford University Press)


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