ABSTRACT
The Florentine painter Nardo di Cione, with his brothers 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 first 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 first 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 offices 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 fragments 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 locations 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.
