ABSTRACT

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- 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 decoration of the Strozzi Chapel exempli 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 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 humanity. The holy 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.