DOMENICO di BARTOLO - Sienese painter, b. at Asciano di Siena. By 1428 he was already enrolled in the register of Sienese painters, and in 1432 he seems to have portrayed the emperor Sigismund on his passage through Siena (the portrait, which was later acquired by the Opera del Duomo, has been lost).
His first certain work is a Madonna with Five Music-making Angels, preserved in the picture gallery of Siena (no. 164), dated 1433, in which the artist chose to sign himself, after a fine invocation in verse to the Virgin: "Dominicus Domini matrem te pinxit et orat". From 1434 is a graffito in the pavement of the cathedral of Siena, representing the emperor Sigismund enthroned with his ministers. While he was engaged in frescoing the sacristy of the Duomo with the Stories of the Four Patrons of Siena (1433-40) - of these compositions, which were destroyed, a fragment has very recently been recovered - he painted a polyptych dated 1438 for the monastery of S. Giuliano of Perugia (now in the gallery of Perugia), a Madonna dated 1437, now in the Johnson collection in Philadelphia, and a chest with scenes of love formerly in the Figdor collection in Vienna. The frescoes illustrating the history and the charitable activities of the "Ospedale" of S. Maria della Scala, executed from 1440 to 1444 in the "Pellegrinaio" of the hospital, together with the Madonna del Manto, now in the sacristy of the same hospital, testify to the last activity of the painter, who died before 1447. D. di B. had a more Florentine than Sienese formation, as is shown by the Madonna of 1433 and by a small panel in the Duveen collection in New York that is unanimously attributed to him and that is certainly earlier than 1433. In these two panels (and particularly in the Madonna of 1433, which is D.'s masterpiece) there is manifested a linear interpretation of the manner of Masaccio of such full and genuine originality as to place D. on the same level as a Lippi and other masters of the Renaissance. But subsequently D.'s art went on losing the freshness of its initial impulses, and undergoing a sort of Gothicizing reinvolution, it sank to a more modestly provincial and illustrative tone. The frescoes of the Pellegrinaio, crowded and disorganized in composition, but rich in acutely realistic observations, also because of the rarity of the subjects they illustrate, nonetheless possess the attraction of a savory and attentive documentation of certain characteristic aspects of the life of the time. - See pl. CX.
Bibliography4 works
Enzo Carli