GADDI, TADDEO e AGNOLO. — Florentine painters of the 14th century. TADDEO (documented for the years 1327–66) was a disciple of Giotto and, in a certain sense, the most «observant» of the Giotto painters.
In the frescoes of the Baroncelli Chapel in S. Croce (1322–38), in the stories on the cupboards of the sacristy of S. Croce (now in the Accademia), in the frescoes of the refectory of S. Croce, in the vault of the apse of S. Francesco in Pisa (1342), etc., he applied himself to translating Giotto’s tightly structured drama into a plain narrative style, enriched with illustrative details and an emphatic, pietistic tone (he was on friendly terms with b. Simone da Cascia). A search for monumentality on the fruitful model of Giotto can be found in his panels (polyptychs of S. Giovanni in Pistoia and S. Felicita in Florence, the Madonna of 1355 in the Uffizi, etc.); a somewhat more intimate note, with Sienese colouristic accents, appears in certain late works, such as the tondi in the vault of the crypt of S. Miniato and the Madonna of the Villa delle Rose. The frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa depicting the Stories of Job, attributed to him by Vasari, display, moreover, a new breadth of landscape and a fanciful chromatic richness, sustained by fervent inspiration, which casts doubt on the traditional attribution.
AGNOLO, his son (active from 1369, d. 1396), had a more delicate artistic temperament and, in contact with various currents of a more advanced Gothic, developed a language that represents the dissolution of the Giottesque academy and the beginning of the Flamboyant Gothic. In the frescoes of S. Piero in Palco, in the series of youthful small panels (the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence, the Vatican, Philadelphia, London), but especially in the autograph portions of the frescoes in the choir of S. Croce (c. 1380), the Castellani Chapel, and the Chapel of the Holy Girdle in Prato Cathedral (1392–95)—executed with extensive collaboration from assistants of varying ability—he succeeded in expressing himself in a subtly rhythmic language of free and flowing line, clear colour, and open, indefinite compositions, having courageously abandoned the plastic grammar and constrained syntax of Giottism. These qualities are instead weakened in the master’s final panels, the altarpiece of S. Miniato (1393–96) and the Louvre predella.