Gaddi, Taddeo and Agnolo

GADDI, TADDEO AND AGNOLO. - Florentine painters of the 14th century. TADDEO (recorded for the years 1327-66) was a disciple of Giotto and, in a certain sense, the most "observant" of the Giottesques.

In the frescoes of the Baroncelli chapel in S. Croce (1322-38), in the scenes on the cupboards of the sacristy of S. Croce (now at 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 applies himself to translating Giotto's tightly knit drama into a plain narrative style, enriched with illustrative details and with an emphatic and pietistic tone (he had ties of friendship with the blessed Simone da Cascia). A quest for monumentality on the model, fruitful, of Giotto is found in his panel paintings (polyptychs of S. Giovanni in Pistoia and of S. Felicita in Florence, Madonna of 1355 in the Uffizi, etc.); a somewhat more intimate accent, with Sienese coloristic emphases, appears in certain late works, such as the roundels in the vault of the crypt of S. Miniato and the Madonna of the Villa delle Rose. The frescoes of the Camposanto in Pisa with the Stories of Job, attributed to him by Vasari, show on the other hand a new breadth of landscape and a fanciful chromatic richness, sustained by a fervent inspiration, such as to cast doubt on the traditional attribution.

AGNOLO, his son (active from 1369, d. 1396) had a more delicate artistic temperament and elaborated, in contact with various currents of a more advanced Gothic, a language that stands as the liquidation of the Giottesque academy and the beginning of the flowering Gothic. In the frescoes of S. Piero in Palco, in the series of youthful small panels (Gallery of the Accademia in Florence, the Vatican, Philadelphia, London), but especially in the autograph portions of the frescoes of the choir of S. Croce (ca. 1380), of the Castellani chapel, and of the chapel of the S. Cingolo in the cathedral of Prato (1392-95) - executed with extensive collaboration of assistants of varying quality - he knew how to express himself in a subtly rhythmic language of loose and flowing line, of limpid color, of open and indefinite compositions, having courageously abandoned the plastic grammar and the tightly bound syntax of Giottism. Qualities that weaken instead in the master's last panel paintings, the altarpiece of S. Miniato (1393-96) and the predella of the Louvre.

Roberto Salvini