Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and St Andrew

religious

Taddeo of Siena was a pupil of a local master, Bartolo di Fredi, but he was most influenced by the leading Tuscan artists of the time, primarily the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini. Though in his altarpieces he employed the traditional forms of the fourteenth century, the marked plasticity of his figures, and their vivacity, foreshadow the trends of the fifteenth century. The central panel of the triptych portrays the Madonna dell'Umilita, a type of representation popular in the fourteenth-century Siena.

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Virgin and Child with St John the Baptist and St Andrew

About the Artist

Taddeo Di Bartolo

1362 – 1422

Sienese painter, active in Pisa, Perugia, San Gimignano, and Volterra, his native city. He was the son of the barber Bartolo di Mino, and he was under 25 in 1386 when he was first recorded, painting statuettes of angels for the new choir-stalls in Siena Cathedral. In 1388–89 he was a counsellor to the Cathedral Works and in 1389 he was first listed as an independent painter. His earliest dated work is the polyptych of the Virgin and Child with Saints (1389; private collection), painted for the chapel of S Paolo at Collegarli, near San Miniato al Tedesco. The thin, elegant figures and curvilinear drapery patterns show aspects of Taddeo's early style to be linked with the works of the preceding generation of Sienese painters, and, like his contemporaries, he looked back to earlier models by Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti. He was a conservative artist, but is noteworthy for his series of frescos on Roman Republican heroes and civic Virtues (1406-14) in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, which are early examples of a type that became popular in the Renaissance.

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