DADDI, BERNARDO. - Florentine painter of the so-called group of the "Giotteschi." Notices from c. 1317 (enrollment in the Arte dei medici e speziali); d. in 1348.
His youthful activity escapes us. The first dated work (triptych Madonna and Two Saints at the Uffizi, 1328, when the painter was certainly between 30 and 40 years old) and the others stylistically akin to it and therefore roughly of that time (pentaptych, picture gallery of Prato; Madonna and Child, Vatican Picture Gallery; St. Benedict, Bardini collection in Florence, etc.) show him as a follower of Giotto's late style, already softened by Sienese influences (so much so that Giotto's Horne St. Stephen was sometimes attributed to D.), but already attentive as well to the painting of Pietro Lorenzetti.
From these works, rather cold and scholastic, there stand apart in quality, within the same period, the two Martyrdoms of St. Lawrence and St. Stephen frescoed in S. Croce: the solemn Giottesque volumes here compose themselves into a rhythm of slightly aestheticizing taste that dilates space and dissolves the Giottesque dramatic-compositional knot into an extended narration, set to music with a certain poetic charm. From '33 onward (small altarpiece of the Bigallo, altarpiece of the Accademia, 1334) B. D. deepens his experience of Sienese painting, drawing especially close to Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and arrives at a style of fused and musical colorism, of delicate compositional rhythms and poetic spatial cadences, often expressing with notable coherence his own feeling of faint religious emotion, of intimate and domestic piety. Thus in the Story of St. Stephen at the Vatican, in that of the Cingolo at the picture gallery of Prato, in that of St. Catherine in American collections, in the polyptych of S. Pancrazio at the Uffizi, etc., perhaps better than in the altarpiece of the tabernacle of Orsammichele, which was not helped by the effort of archaism that the painter imposed on himself out of fidelity to an older exemplar.