Born in La Vrana, near Zara, in Dalmatia, Francesco was an itinerant marble sculptor whose first documented work in 1453 was on the triumphal arch of the Castelnuovo, Naples. Between 1461 and 1466 he worked for Rene d'Anjou in France and then went to Sicily, where he worked for four years or more, producing two notable statues of the Virgin and Child both dated 1471 for Santa Maria della Veve in Palermo and for the church of the Crucifixion at Noto, and another for Sant'Agostino, Messina.

Francesco later returned to Naples and ultimately to France, working at Marseilles and Avignon (1477-83). His is a vivid and realistic style which is at its best in narrative reliefs. However, he also excelled at portrait busts with very idealized features, which convey an impression of the quiet introspection on the part of the sitters. They are some of the most poetic renderings of women's heads in Renaissance art. Two of the best are in the Frick Collection, New York: so abstracted are they that their identification with Renaissance princesses is unsure, except in the rare cases when they are specifically inscribed (as on the Beatrice of Aragon in the Frick Collection).

The features of Francesco's documented Madonnas of 1471 are similarly idealized, with pure ovoid faces framed by centrally parted and softly waving hair, long straight noses, neatly arched eyebrows and rosebud lips. It is by comparison with them that the present very beautiful though fragmentary head my be attributed to Laurana and tentatively dated to the 1460's or 1470's.