DADDI, BERNARDO. — Florentine painter of the so-called group of “Giotteschi.” Known from about 1317 (enrollment in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries); d. in 1348.
Little is known of his early activity. The first dated work (a triptych of the Madonna and two saints at the Uffizi, 1328, when the painter was certainly between thirty and forty years old) and other stylistically related works from roughly the same period (a pentaptych, Prato Pinacoteca; Madonna and Child, Vatican Pinacoteca; St. Benedict, Bardini Collection in Florence, etc.) show him as a follower of the late style, already softened by Sienese influences from Giotto (so much so that Giotto’s St. Stephen in the Horne Collection was sometimes attributed to Daddi), while also attentive to the painting of Pietro Lorenzetti.
From these rather cold and academic works, two frescoes of the Martyrs of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen in Santa Croce stand out in quality within the same period: the solemn Giottesque volumes are here composed into a rhythm of slightly aesthetic taste that expands space and loosens the dramatic-compositive knot of Giotto into a narrative that is both relaxed and musical, with a certain poetic charm. From 1333 onward (the Bigallo altarpiece, the Accademia altarpiece, 1334), Bernardo Daddi deepens his engagement with Sienese painting, drawing especially close to Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and arrives at a style of fused and musical colorism, delicate compositional rhythms, and poetic spatial cadences, often expressing with notable coherence a sense of gentle religious emotion, intimate and homely piety. Thus in the Stories of St. Stephen at the Vatican, those of the Cingolo at the Prato Pinacoteca, those of St. Catherine in American collections, in the polyptych of St. Pancrazio at the Uffizi, etc., and perhaps best of all in the altarpiece of the tabernacle of Orsanmichele, though the painter’s attempt at archaism, undertaken in fidelity to an older exemplar, did not serve him well.