N

NARDO DI CIONE (died c. 1336)
The Florentine painter Nardo di Cione, with his broth-
ers Andrea (called Orcagna) and Jacopo, dominated
painting in Florence in the decades following the black
death of 1348. Nardo’s date of birth is not known. His
name appears for the fi rst time in 1346–1348 in a list
of members of the guild of doctors and apothecaries,
the guild to which the painters belonged. By then his
reputation was already established, for c. 1348, when
the authorities of Pistoia asked the Florentines for the
names of their best painters to execute the high altarpiece
for Pistoia’s church of San Giovanni Fuorcivitas, Nardo
was recommended along with Orcagna. At this time
the brothers were living in the parish of San Michele
Visdomini and may have shared a workshop. In the
1350s and the fi rst half of the 1360s Nardo lived in the
center of Florence, but not always in the same parish as
Orcagna, although the two of them may have continued
to work together. In 1356 Nardo signed a panel of the
Madonna which hung in the offi ces of the Gabella dei
Contratti but which no longer survives. And in 1363 he
was paid for painting “the vault and other things” in the
oratory of the confraternity of the Bigallo; only frag-
ments of this work remain. These are the only two works
to which his name can positively be attached. Nardo
made his will in 1365, and by May 1366 he had died.
Apart from a bequest to the Bigallo, he left his money
and possessions to be divided equally among his three
brothers—Andrea, Jacopo, and Matteo. Since no wife or
children are mentioned, Nardo was probably a bachelor.
These few facts are all we have for a working life that
can be documented over some twenty years. Although
most of Nardo’s painting seems to have been for loca-
tions in Florence, he may also have worked elsewhere.
At an unknown date the Pistoian painter Bartolommeo
Cristiani entered into an agreement whereby whenever
he worked outside Florence, Nardo would help him.

In an altarpiece now in Prague the presence of Saint

Ranieri, a patron saint of Pisa, suggests that Nardo may

have painted it for a church in that town.

Nardo is credited with about a dozen surviving

works comprising frescoes, altarpieces, and small-scale

devotional panels. In reconstructing an oeuvre for him,

Offner (I960) relied on stylistic evidence provided by the

frescoes in the Strozzi Chapel in Santa Maria Novella

(Florence), which Ghiberti, writing in the mid-fi fteenth

century, ascribed to Nardo. Here, on three walls, Nardo

represented the Last Judgment with a scene of heaven

and a hell in which the imagery is derived from Dante’s

description in the Inferno. The frescoes are probably

contemporary with the altarpiece in the same chapel that

Orcagna painted between 1354 and 1357. The decora-

tion of the Strozzi Chapel exemplifi es the Florentine

taste in art after mid-century, a taste that departed in

some ways from the more naturalistic style pioneered by

Giotto. Spatial illusionism is rejected in favor of more

abstract two-dimensional effects. The saints of Nardo’s

Paradise, for example, are stacked up tier on tier, like, as

one writer said, a football crowd. Medieval conventions

of scale, in which a fi gure’s place in the hierarchy of

the holy is indicated by his size, are strictly followed.

God’s divinity and the otherworldly piety of the saints

tend to be emphasized at the expense of their human-

ity. The holy fi gures appear self-absorbed, preserving

their distance from each other and from the spectator.

Some of these characteristics may be seen in Nardo’s

large-scale panel of the Virgin and saints belonging to

the New York Historical Society and his altarpiece with

three saints in the National Gallery, London.

This reversion to what have been seen as archaizing

modes of representation that draw on late thirteenth-

century formulas has been explained in terms of the

unsophisticated and conservative taste of a new bour-

geois class in Florentine society (Antal 1948) and the