Bicci di Lorenzo

A prolific artist and a member of a successful dynasty of painters, which had been operating on the Florentine market for over a century (and which came to an end with his son Neri), Bicci di Lorenzo inherited a flourishing workshop from his father, gradually taking over the running of it in the early 15th century. Yet his own artistic personality only began to acquire a sharper outline some time in the 1410s¹.

He worked with his father Lorenzo on a tabernacle depicting the Madonna and Child Enthroned with Angels and Saints, known as the Madonnone, in the neighbourhood of the Abbey of San Salvi outside the walls of Florence – now detached and placed for safekeeping in the abbey church itself –, whose rich decoration and fine draughtsmanship reveal a desire to soften and transcend the stern character of Andrea Orcagna’s style that had formed the basis of hs father Lorenzo’s style².

This also appears to be the path that Bicci pursued in his first signed work, an Annunciation with St. Michael the Archangel, St. James the Elder, St. Margaret and St. John the Evangelist in the Pieve di Santa Maria Assunta in Stia (Arezzo), painted in 1414, where a more accentuated linear elegance betrays a fascination with the flowing style of Agnolo Gaddi and Spinello Aretino, mitigating his father’s influence.

The fragmentary polyptych in the Museo della Collegiata di Sant’Andrea in Empoli, which marked the peak of Bicci’s output, was painted in the early 1420s. Commissioned from him by the Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, it reflected the last will and testament of Simone Guiducci of Spicchio, who had left the hospital money for the decoration of his chapel in the Collegiata, dedicated to St. Leonard, in 1417³. The commission had initially been assigned to Arcangelo di Cola da Camerino, whom the hospital had previously employed to paint the altarpiece for the chapel of Ilarione de’ Bardi in Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli. When Arcangelo left Florence for Rome in 1422, however, the hospital was forced to turn to Bicci di Lorenzo who was busy at the time painting the frescoes in that selfsame chapel in the church where a little later – some time before 1427 – he also decorated the chapel of Niccolò da Uzzano.

The polyptych for the Collegiata was painted between 1423 and 1426, the year in which the last payment is recorded for the work which, by then, had already been shipped to Empoli. In Bicci’s technically irreproachable painting we can detect the influence on him of the work of both Arcangelo di Cola and Gentile da Fabriano, who was in Florence in those years and who transmitted to Bicci his love of worked surfaces embellished with sophisticated texturing on metal foil, for example in the symbols of the evangelists grained “in relief” on gold on the arms of the Virgin’s throne⁴.

Bicci continued to work in Empoli after completing the polyptych for the Collegiata. In the church of Santo Stefano degli Agostiniani, for example, he was employed on a number of commissions, such as the now fragmentary frescoes in the south transept, adjacent to Masolino’s work, or those in the Chapel of St. Mary Magdalen⁵. The 1420s also saw him working in Florence on a series of frescoes in the convent of Sant’Onofrio, known as “di Fuligno”, while it was undergoing renovation.

A considerable increase in the number of commissions in the following decade points to Bicci’s growing popularity. It was at this time that he cautiously set aside the linear elegance and preciousness of the Gothic style in favour of a more controlled and pondered approach revealing a timid interest in the work of such artists as Masolino and Fra’ Angelico, whose example, however, he revisited in the light of his own archaicising manner.

These were the years in which he painted the polyptych of Vertine, dated 1430 and now on permanent loan to the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena, the polyptych of Cetica in the Casentino region, and the particularly demanding polyptych of San Niccolò a Cafaggio, dated 1433, the dismembered panels of which are now held by various public and private collections, while its predella is inspired by the stories from the life of St. Nicholas painted by Gentile da Fabriano in his own altarpiece for the Quaratesi Chapel in the church of San Niccolò Oltrarno in Florence⁶.

The frescoes that Bicci painted in collaboration with Stefano d’Antonio and Bonaiuto di Giovanni for the Compagni Chapel in the Vallombrosan church of Santa Trinita in Florence at around this time are now extremely fragmentary, while his polyptych for the altar depicting the Madonna and Child with St. John Gualbert, St. Anthony the Abbot, St. John the Baptist and St. Catherine of Alexandria was bequeathed to Westminster Abbey by Lord Lee of Farham in 1947. It is devoid of its predella, but a number of panels from that predella have survived. St John Gualbert and the Destruction of the Abbey of Moscheta is in a private collection, the Nativity of Christ is also in a private collection and the Baptism of Christ is now in the York Art Gallery in York⁷.

The same decade, in the course of which Bicci relied on an increasingly tried and tested formula, typified by a triptych depicting the Madonna and Child with Four Saints in the church of Sant’Ippolito in Bibbiena, saw him working in Florence Cathedral in 1435-6 and again in 1439-40, when he and his son Neri were involved in crafting the tomb of Luigi Marsili. Major commissions are also documented in the last part of Bicci’s prolific career. In the early 1440s, he painted an Annunciation for the church of Sant’Arcangelo in Legnaia (Florence) and the now lost altarpiece for the high altar of the church of Sant’Egidio, where he also painted a fresco depicting the Consecration of St. Aegidius, now detached and displayed in the Museo dell’Ospedale di Santa Maria Nuova in Florence. Payment records for the frescoes in the vault of the chancel in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo are dated 1447, but Bicci left the work unfinished and it was later completed by Piero della Francesca with his celebrated Stories of the True Cross. It was around this time that Neri took over management of Bicci’s flourishing workshop, and Bicci himself is recorded as having died in 1452.