Bernardo Daddi

Daddi was admitted to the guild of painters in Florence in the early 1320s. From this decade come a group of paintings whose weighty scale and three-dimensional forms, achieved through pronounced chiaroscuro modelling, show his debt to Giotto. The greatest of these early works are the Santa Croce frescoes and the Virgin and Child with Saints Nicholas and Matthew of 1328 now in the Uffizi, Florence. In the early 1330s Daddi experimented with the altarpiece format, introducing figures which inhabit a space which goes beyond the compartments imposed by the traditional polyptych structure. But for much of the 1330s the best known works by Daddi and his workshop were relatively small-scale triptychs such as the painting in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (1334), the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (1335), the Scottish National Gallery, Edinburgh (1338) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis (1339). In paintings such as the Getty Madonna and Child with Saints Thomas Aquinas and Paul we still see the influence of Giotto in the massive figure of the Madonna but also elements learned from the Sienese artists Pietro and Ambrogio Lorinzetti (1290–1348), such as the sweet expression of the Madonna and his emphasis on the decorative qualities of the draperies. Daddi’s last known work a polyptych of the Crucifixion with Saints was painted in 1348, year of the Black Death. Its design anticipates the work of Andrea di Cione (Orcagna) (1308–1368) and Jacopo di Cione (1325–1390).