Zanobi di Benedetto di Caroccio degli Strozzi, normally referred to more simply as Zanobi Strozzi, was an Italian Renaissance painter and manuscript illuminator active in Florence and nearby Fiesole. He was closely associated with Fra Angelico, probably as his pupil, as told by Vasari. He is the same painter as the Master of the Buckingham Palace Madonna. Most of his surviving works are manuscript illuminations but a number of panel paintings have also been attributed to him, including seven altarpieces and six panels with the Virgin and Child, along with some designs for metalwork.
Vasari says Strozzi "painted pictures and panels for a great many private houses in Florence"; he also mentions a double portrait. Strozzi may have been something of a pioneer in small narrative pictures for homes, which departed from the usual subject of the Virgin and Child.
He was one of the most important Florentine illuminators of his day, with documents confirming his participation in at least eighteen surviving manuscripts (in which he often worked as but one of a group of artists). This stands in contrast to his paintings, which are all attributed to him on the basis of style alone.
Strozzi was born in Florence on 17 November 1412. He was a member of the extended Strozzi family, a wealthy and noble clan that rivaled the Medici family. After he was orphaned at age 15, Strozzi went to live with the artist Battista di Biagio Sanguigni, described in documents as his "tutor" but more probably also his teacher in the art of painting and illumination. Sometime between 1427 and 1430 the pair moved to Fiesole, about five miles from Florence.
Strozzi is not recorded as joining the Florentine painters' guild the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali, thereby precluding him from contracting paintings (as opposed to illuminations) under his own name in Florence. His commissions must thus have been received on behalf of other artists, like Sanguigni or Fra Angelico, who according to Vasari was another of Strozzi's teachers. Strozzi and Sanguigni would have both met Angelico in the 1430s at the convent of San Domenico, Fiesole, Angelico's base until 1436.
In 1438 Strozzi married and moved into a new house in the same parish in Fiesole. Before that he was sharing a house with Sanguigni. When Fra Angelico moved to Rome in 1446, Strozzi moved to Florence, where he rented a house in the parish of San Paolo, near Santa Maria Novella. In 1450 he bought a house in another parish. On his death in 1468 he was buried in Santa Maria Novella, Florence.
