Duccio di Boninsegna, probably of his school, was celebrated as the restorer of that inlaid kind of Mosaic, called "Lavoro di Commesso." His works are from 1275, the year in which he received a commission for Sta. Maria Novella at Florence, to 1311, the period at which he was employed in the Domo of Sienna. If these dates be genuine, he can scarcely have lived till 1357, the year at which Fiorillo fixes his death. It is not probable that he should have stretched his span beyond a century, which must have been the case, if we suppose that he was twenty at the time he painted in S. Maria Novella; it is not probable that he should have chosen, or been suffered, to remain idle with the celebrity he had acquired in the labours of the Domo; and it is still less probable, that, if he was employed, what he produced in the interval, between that period and his death, should have perished or been destroyed, whilst we are still in possession of the paintings in the Domo, which made nearly an epoch in art, at which he laboured three years, for which he was paid upwards of 3000 scudi d'oro, the expense of gilding and ultramarine included. That part of it which faced the audience, represented in large figures the Madonna and various saints; that which fronted the choir, divided into many compartments, exhibited numerous compositions of Gospel subjects in figures of small proportion; it cannot be denied, that with all its copiousness, the whole savours strongly of the Greek manner. Andrea Taffi, born 1213, the scholar of Apollonius, a Greek painter, and his assistant in some mosaics at S. Giovanni of Florence, is not mentioned out of that line by Vasari and Baldinucci: but the discovery of a picture with his name by Ignazio Stugford adds another legitimate name to the predecessors of Cimabue.