DOMENICO DI BARTOLO

DOMENICO di BARTOLO - Sienese painter, born in Asciano di Siena. In 1428 he was already enrolled in the guild of Sienese painters, and in 1432 he is believed to have painted the portrait of Emperor Sigismund during his passing through

His first certain work is a Madonna with Five Music-making Angels, preserved in the Pinacoteca of Siena (no. 164), dated 1433, in which the artist was pleased to sign his name, after a fine invocation in verse to the Virgin: "Dominicus Domini matrem te pinxit et orat". Dating from 1434 is a graffito in the pavement of the Siena cathedral, representing Emperor Sigismund enthroned with his ministers. While he was busy frescoing the sacristy of the Cathedral with the Stories of the Four Patron Saints of Siena (1433-40) — a fragment of these destroyed compositions has very recently been recovered — he painted a polyptych dated 1438 for the monastery of S. Giuliano in Perugia (now in the Perugia gallery), a Madonna dated 1437, now in the Johnson collection in Philadelphia, and a casket with love scenes formerly in the Figdor collection in Vienna. The frescoes illustrating the history and 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, bear witness to the final activity of the painter, who died before 1447. D. di B. had a training more Florentine than Sienese, as demonstrated by the Madonna of 1433 and a small panel in the Duveen collection in New York which is unanimously attributed to him and is certainly prior to 1433. In these two panels (and particularly in the Madonna of 1433, which is D.'s masterpiece) a linear interpretation of Masaccio's manner manifests itself with 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 lost the freshness of its initial impulses and, undergoing a sort of Gothicizing involution, sank to a more modestly provincial and illustrative tone. The frescoes of the Pellegrinaio, crowded and disorganic in composition, but rich in acutely realistic notations, also due to the rarity of the subjects they illustrate, nevertheless possess the attraction of a delightful and attentive documentation of certain characteristic aspects of the life of the time. - See pl. CX.