Bernardo Daddi, Florentine painter

Bernardo Daddi (circa 1290-1348) was an Italian painter. Florentine in style, Daddi worked in Giotto’s workshop together with those who influenced his more mature style in later years of life (like for example Taddeo and Agnolo Gaddi, and Giovanni da Milano).

The painters who worked in Florence from the period of Giotto until the Renaissance are characterized by a more refined and efficient style that is neither late-Gothic style, nor Proto-Renaissance. Art criticism has always been rather hard on these painters. Nonetheless, Daddi’s work was very well liked at the time, and he was able to obtain important commissions, both from institutions and from private art lovers and collectors. In this way, he became one of the wealthiest and most renowned Florentine painters at the time. He died in 1348, probably from the plague.

Daddi's first work was the Ognissanti Triptych in 1330, today housed at the Uffizi. He painted a fresco in the Capella Pulci in Florence’s Santa Croce (which was later renamed the Cappella Berarldi, and then the Cappella Bardi di Liberta’). Here, he painted the Stories of St. Lawrence in circa 1330. Regarding the grotesque stylistic elements used at the time, Daddi’s art is much more refined, similar to the more aristocratic (and much more well liked by Florence’s upper-bourgeoisie) Sienese style. His accurate and more complex use of color and form are features that will be increasingly evident in his later work. Among his other masterworks, there is: a small altarpiece from 1333, conserved at the Bargello museum, the predellas in Santo Stefano, a “San Domenico”, and a Polyptych from the Prato cathedral. Finally, the Madonna with Child, today conserved in Orsanmichele, was most likely his last work.