Margaritone d'Arezzo

Vasari, also from Arezzo, "devotes a good deal of space to him as an early painter from his home town".

[7] Margaritone's style is distinctive, though with similarities to other Italo-Byzantine painters of the mid-century, such as the Master of the Bigallo Crucifix in Florence and Berlinghiero in Lucca.

His work has at times been dismissed as either reactionary and provincial, partly because Vasari's life placed him several decades later than the probable real dates, making him seem more conservative than he actually was.

According to one standard popular history in 1914, his London altarpiece "in spite of a certain swarthy splendour, is an impotent, nerveless, almost comic thing, retaining some refinement of line and pattern from the Roman-Byzantine models it copies, together with a proficiency in mere execution common to the tradition".

[9] The National Gallery's annual report for 1858 justified its purchase, as part of the Lombardi-Baldi collection, as serving "to show the barbarous state into which art had sunk even in Italy previously to its revival".