DADDI, BERNARDO. — Florentine painter belonging to the so-called group of the “Giotteschi.” Documented from ca. 1317 (enrollment in the Guild of Physicians and Apothecaries); d. in 1348.
His youthful activity remains unknown to us. The first dated work (the triptych Madonna and Two Saints in the Uffizi, 1328, when the painter was certainly between 30 and 40 years old) and the other stylistically related works, and therefore approximately contemporary (polyptych, picture gallery of Prato; Madonna and Child, Vatican picture gallery; S. Benedetto, Bardini Collection in Florence, etc.), show him to have been a follower of Giotto’s late style, already softened by Sienese influences (so much so that Giotto’s S. Stefano Horne was at times attributed to D.), but already attentive also to the painting of Pietro Lorenzetti.
Within the same period, the two Martyrdoms of S. Lorenzo and S. Stefano, frescoed in S. Croce, stand apart from these rather cold and academic works in quality: here the solemn Giottesque volumes are arranged in a rhythm of slightly aestheticizing taste that expands the space and releases the Giottesque dramatic-compositional knot into a flowing, musical narrative of some poetic charm. From ’33 onward (the Bigallo altarpiece, the altarpiece of the Accademia, 1334), B. D. deepened his experience of Sienese painting, drawing particularly close to Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and arrived at a style of blended and musical colorism, delicate compositional rhythms, and poetic spatial cadences, often expressing with considerable coherence his own feeling of gentle religious emotion, of intimate and homely piety. Thus in the Story of S. Stefano in the Vatican, in that of the Cingolo in the picture gallery of Prato, in that of S. Caterina in American collections, in the polyptych of S. Pancrazio in the Uffizi, etc., perhaps more successfully than in the altarpiece of the tabernacle of Orsammichele, which was not helped by the archaizing effort the painter imposed upon himself out of fidelity to an older example.