ORCAGNA, ANDREA di CIONE ARCAGNOLO, Called L'. - Florentine painter, sculptor and architect, d. 1376. Recorded among the Florentine painters in 1343, his name reappears in many documents up to 1368.

His greatest pictorial work is the "Strozzi Altarpiece" in S. Maria Novella in Florence, signed and dated Anno Domini MCCCLVII Andreas Cionis de Florentia me pinxit, with Christ giving the keys to St. Peter and the book to St. Dominic, flanked by other saints. Recently, on the occasion of the restorations carried out in S. Maria Novella, the remains of the decoration of the vault of the main chapel were recovered, among which were strongly characterized, noble figures of prophets. Other paintings assigned to him should rather be attributed to his brothers Vardo and Jacopo and to the numerous disciples and assistants. In any case his name is insistently repeated for the fragment of a fresco with the Triumph of Death in S. Croce, assigned instead by some scholars to his brother Nardo, a painter of broad capabilities and author of the frescoes of the Strozzi chapel in S. Maria Novella with the representation of Paradise.

ORCAGNA, ANDREA - Prophet in the vault of the main chapel of S. Maria Novella - Florence.(from L. Becherneci, Ritrovamenti e restauri orcagneschi, in Bollettino d'arte, 1918, p. 87, fig. 3)

A work of architecture and sculpture together, on the other hand, is the tabernacle of Orsanmichele, all tracery, carvings, reliefs, inlays, completed by O. in its main core in 1359 but finished in the bronze balustrade with marble pillars and statues of angels only a few years later (1366). O. appears a dominant personality in all three of the arts he professed, and if not exactly a reactionary, then the one who with the greatest clarity and vigor reasserted in the mid-1300s a Florentine art opposed to whatever in the masters of the generation after Giotto could seem a concession to exotic tastes. This is clear, beyond the "Strozzi Altarpiece," above all in the sculptures that decorate the tabernacle of Orsanmichele, where even the architectural lines of the round arch seemed to state a polemical reason in the face of the Sienese and Pisan Gothicisms that toward the middle of the century had invaded Florence.

Bibliography4 works

BIBL.: E. Lavagnino, L'arte medioevale, Turin 1936, pp. 599-601, 672-75; L. Coletti, Storia della pittura italiana, I Primitivi, II, Novara 1946, pp. L-LIII; L. Becherucci, Ritrovamenti e restauri orcagneschi, in Bollettino d'Arte, 4th series, 1 (1948), pp. 24-33; P. Toesca, Il Trecento, Turin 1951, pp. 342, 635-79.

Emilio Lavagnino

@incollection{ec9_orcagna_andrea_di_cione_arcagn, author = {Lavagnino, Emilio}, title = {Orcagna, andrea di cione arcagnolo, detto l'}, booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica}, volume = {IX}, pages = {214--215}, note = {Cited by column}, publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico}, address = {Città del Vaticano}, year = {1952}, url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/orcagna-andrea-di-cione-arcagnolo-detto-l} }

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Orcagna, Andrea di Cione Arcagnolo, called l'

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