DOMENICO di Bartolo - Sienese painter born in Asciano near Siena. By 1428 he was already enrolled in the roll of Sienese painters, and in 1432 he appears to have portrayed Emperor Sigismund during his passage through Siena (the portrait, later purchased by the Opera del Duomo, has been lost).
His first secure work is a Madonna with Five Musicians, preserved in the Siena Pinacoteca (no. 164), dated 1433, in which the artist liked to inscribe himself after a fine invocation in verse to the Virgin: “Domicius Domini matrem te pinxit et orat.” From 1434 is a graffito in the pavement of Siena Cathedral, depicting the Emperor Sigismund enthroned with his ministers. While engaged in painting the Stories of the Four Patrons of Siena in the sacristy of the Duomo (1435–40)—of these compositions, now destroyed, a fragment has been recovered very recently—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 amorous 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 painter’s final activity; he died before 1447.
Domenico’s training was more Florentine than Sienese, as shown by the Madonna of 1433 and an *Annunciation* in the Duveen Collection in New York, unanimously attributed to him and certainly painted before 1433. In these two panels (and especially in the Madonna of 1433, which is Domenico’s masterpiece) there appears a linear interpretation of Masaccio’s style of such full and frank originality as to place Domenico on the same level as a Lippi and other Renaissance masters. Subsequently, however, his art lost the freshness of its initial impulses and, undergoing a sort of Gothicizing regression, declined to a more modestly provincial and illustrative tone. The Pellegrinaio frescoes, crowded and disorderly in composition but rich in sharply realistic notations—also because of the rarity of the subjects they depict—nevertheless possess the charm of a lively and attentive documentation of certain characteristic aspects of contemporary life. — See pl. CX.