Biography

Parri Spinelli [Guasparri di Spinello], Italian painter, draughtsman and goldsmith, part of the Spinelli family, son of Spinello Aretino. Although many of his frescoes are lost, an impressive number of drawings has survived. He is first recorded in Siena, once in 1405 as recipient of a payment made to his father for work in the cathedral, and again in 1407, when he was named as an assistant in Spinello Aretino's contract for the frescoes in the Sala dei Priori (Sala della Balia) in the Palazzo Pubblico. His idiosyncratic style and eccentric figures, which appear to be in a state of frenzied animation, bear little or no relation to Spinello's sober, more monumental approach, although both painters had the same delicacy of handling. However, he derived gothicizing elements from his father and developed them to an exaggerated degree.

Vasari wrote that Parri was apprenticed to Lorenzo Ghiberti, and he probably spent several formative years in Florence after Spinello's death; his uncle Niccolò had a goldsmith's workshop there with his sons Cola Spinelli (1384-1458) and Forzore Spinelli (1397-1477), who were also both goldsmiths. Parri was certainly influenced by Ghiberti and his followers, and by the paintings of Lorenzo Monaco, whose graceful figures with attenuated proportions reappear even more sinuously in his own works.

By 1419 he was back in Arezzo and apparently never left again. His brother Baldassare stated in their joint tax declaration of 1427 that Parri had been ill for eight years and was unable to work; in 1431 he was declared to be 'infirm of mind'.