BARNA (BERNA) DA SIENA. — Painter of the Sienese school of the fourteenth century. Remembered by Ghiberti as “most excellent, most skillful, and most learned,” it is not known when he was born. Vasari relates that he died in 1381, falling from a bridge while frescoing the Stories of the New Testament in the collegiate church of S. Gimignano, with the result that the cycle had to be completed by his pupil Giovanni d’Asciano. Since documentary evidence concerning the painter is entirely lacking, there were even those who doubted his historical existence; this opinion, however, is rejected by the great majority of scholars, who agree in recognizing in the frescoes at S. Gimignano, despite the extensive collaboration of assistants, the presence of an artistic personality with highly distinctive and unmistakable characteristics. It is also highly probable that the B. mentioned by the early historians is to be identified with a B. di Bertino, a painter belonging to the people of S. Pellegrino who, according to a document discovered by Milanese, sat among the jurors at the tribunal of the Mercanzia of Siena in 1340. The chronology of the cycle at S. Gimignano is instead extremely difficult and controversial: numerous arguments would militate against the date proposed by Vasari, yet followed and defended by several authoritative Italian scholars, while others tend to believe that the frescoes were executed around the middle of the century, that is, before the cycle of the Old Bartolo di Fredi (v.) in the same church. The recent revision of the traditional dating of the latter cycle from 1356 to 1367 may constitute a new and important argument in favor of the priority of B.’s frescoes over those of Bartolo di Fredi.
Very few panel paintings can, on the basis of stylistic analogies with the frescoes at S. Gimignano, be attributed to B. with any degree of reliability: among them are a beautiful Madonna and Child in the church of S. Francesco of Asciano Senese and a Christ Carrying the Cross in the Frick Collection of Nuova York. Trained under Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi, B., in the cycle at S. Gimignano, takes up again with renewed vigor and an independent spirit the pure narrative vein that lay at the origin of Duccio’s inspiration, while imbuing it with a profoundly dramatic intensity, at times not without a certain rough popular character. Also because of the originality of his position, B. is undoubtedly the most vital and important personality in all fourteenth-century Sienese painting after the death of the Lorenzetti.