Mariotto di Nardo

Italian, active 1394–1424

BiographyThe standard source for the life of Mariotto di Nardo is Colnaghi's Dictionary of Florentine Painters10 where it is claimed that he was the son of a Florentine stonecutter, maestro Nardo di Cione, about whom it is known only that he was employed in 1380 and 1381 in Siena and Volterra. Recently, however, Ladis has suggested that his father was the painter Nardo di Cione (d. 1365),11 which would establish Mariotto as heir to one of the most distinguished artistic dynasties of Florence, and in part explain his inordinate popularity and influence in the years immediately before and after 1400. The earliest documented reference to Mariotto di Nardo is a contract of 1394/95 to paint an altarpiece for San Donnino a Villamagna, although a Madonna and Child dated 1393 (Sta. Cristina a Pagnana) can be securely attributed to him on stylistic grounds. That his career most likely began at least a decade before this has been deduced, by Boskovits,12 from the regularity of commissions he received in the 1390s from the Opera del Duomo (the board of works of the Cathedral) in Florence, indicating his status as a well-established master by that time. Boskovits's deduction may now be confirmed by the death date of his putative father.

Mariotto di Nardo appears to have assumed the role of one of the principal masters of Florence following the death of Agnolo Gaddi in 1396,13 and to have retained that distinction even into the first decade of the fifteenth century. Among his assistants and followers may have numbered as important an artist as Lorenzo Ghiberti, who later claimed credit in his Commentari for Mariotto's designs for the stained-glass window of the Assumption in the central oculus of Florence Cathedral (1405). Although the frequency and prestige of his commissions in Florence continued unabated until about 1416, when he painted an altarpiece for the oratory of the Bigallo, Mariotto worked increasingly for provincial patrons in his later career and depended increasingly on the intervention of assistants in the execution of both his large- and small-scale works. Mariotto's last will and testament is dated 24 April 1424, and it may be presumed that he died shortly afterwards.