TADDEO di BARTOLO. — Painter, born in Siena around 1362, died there in 1422; son of Bartolo di Mino, a barber, and not of the painter Bartolo di Fredi (Vasari).
The earliest work signed and dated by him, a polyptych from 1389 previously in S. Paolo at Collagarli (S. Miniato) and considered lost, resurfaced in 1950 at an auction in London. In 1393, in Genoa, he undertook the painting of two altarpieces in the church of S. Luca; upon returning to Tuscany, he executed the frescoes of the Last Judgment in the collegiate church of S. Gimignano; in 1395 he painted an altarpiece in Pisa for the Sardi chapel in S. Francesco, later moved to the Museum of Grenoble; in 1397, the Baptism of Christ for the baptistery of Triora; in 1400 he signed and dated the triptych in the Compagnia di S. Caterina della Notte in Siena, and in 1401 the grand triptych with the Assumption for the cathedral of Montepulciano, the largest panel painting of the entire Sienese school. From 1406 to 1408 he frescoed the Stories of the Virgin (now partly repainted) in the inner chapel of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena; the cycle was completed with the frescoes in the ante-chapel, executed in 1414. Of 1409 is the Annunciation between SS. Cosmas and Damian in the Pinacoteca of Siena (no. 131), one of his most important works. His last dated work is the Madonna of 1418 in the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, Mass. (U.S.A.). Taddeo concluded with nobility the pictorial tradition begun in the first half of the fourteenth century by the Lorenzetti, in the advanced Quattrocento: an artist lacking in boldness but always dignified and correct, he contributed to spreading Sienese painting once more beyond the borders of his city, in Liguria as in Umbria and Sicily.