Domenico di Bartolo | Art in Tuscany | Podere Santa Pia, Holiday house in the south of Tuscany

Domenico di Bartolo

Domenico di Bartolo (c. 1400/1404 – 1445/1447) was an Italian painter of the Sienese School. He was born in Asciano. According to Vasari, he was a nephew of Taddeo di Bartolo. He was born in Asciano. In the early 1400s, the Sienese artist most influenced by the new Florentine style of painting was Domenico di Bartolo. He was, in fact, the only Sienese painter of his day to receive commissions from Florentine clients. Domenico di Bartolo. was employed by Vecchietta in the masterpiece fresco The Care of the Sick in the Pellegrinaio (Pilgrim's Hall) of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scala in Siena. It portrays wealthy donors visiting the hospital to men washing the ill, and a fatty friar hearing confession. In 1434, he also painted a fresco panel of Emperor Sigismund Enthroned for the Siena Cathedral. He was the tutor of Piero della Francesca. Domenico died in Siena around 1445.
Domenico di Bartolo's major surviving achievement is his participation in a series of frescoes in the Pellegrinaio, the hall for pilgrims at Siena's Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. Many great Sienese artists worked for Santa Maria della Scala at some time, making it the city's third important centre of art, together with the Duomo (cathedral) and the Palazzo Pubblico (Town Hall). But the most prestigious example of Sienese art in the Santa Maria della Scala complex, is the Pellegrinaio ward or 'pilgrims' hospice', built in the second half of the 14th century and decorated almost a century later with an important fresco cycle devoted to the history of the hospital. Artistic Treasures include a famous fresco cycle (now lost) with Histories of the Virgin, on the façade, by Simone Martini, Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti (1335); the series of frescoes with the Stories of the Hospital in the Pellegrinaio Hall, by Domenico di Bartolo and Lorenzo Vecchietta. Domenico di Bartolo's frescoes have unusual secular subjects, which deal with the charitable, civic, and medical activities of the hospital. The Gothic vaulting of the room determined the arched openings. The settings are sometimes the rooms of the hospital itself. In their naturalism and their wealth of imagery drawn from contemporary life, these frescoes provide remarkable insight into Sienese activities. In the six bays of the hall, two frescoes on the east wall (The Enlargement of the Hospital; Extension of Privileges by Celestine III), and four on the north wall (Feeding of the Poor; Raising and Marrying of Orphans; Reception of Pilgrims and Distribution of Alms; Caring for the Sick) were executed by Domenico di Bartolo.		Santa Maria della Scala served as a hospital from the 10th Century until 1996.


Domenico di Bartolo, Care of the Sick, 1441-42, fresco in Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala, Siena
In the Care of the Sick Domenico combines specific portraiture with a sensitive treatment of the nude figure. The unidealized bodies of the sick man being placed in bed and the wounded man being washed rank among the most naturalistic figures in Quattrocento painting.


Domenico di Bartolo, Almsgiving, ca. 1444, fresco in Pellegrinaio of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scalla, Siena
The Rearing and Marriage of Female Foundlings This fresco is located on the west wall of the Pellegrinaio in the Spedale di Santa Maria della Scala. The Pellegrinaio is a fourteenth-century room took the form of a long vaulted hall situated on the ground floor of the hospital. Between 1441 and 1442, Domenico di Bartolo executed three large mural paintings on the west wall - the Care of the Sick, the Reception of Pilgrims and the Distribution of Alms and the Rearing and Marriage of Female Foundlings - all of which recorded the hospital's main activities, as clearly set out in the surviving fourteenth-century statutes. Domenico di Bartolo's The Marriage of the Foundlings features a large carpet with a Chinese-inspired phoenix-and-dragon pattern, 1440. Domenico di Bartolo (Asciano ca. 1400-- 1447, Siena) Date: ca. 1444 Original location: in situ, in the Pellegrinaio of the Ospedale di Santa Maria della Scalla, Siena Medium and Size: fresco Literature: The painting combines two sacraments: matrimony and almsgiving. Right image: Phoenix-and-dragon carpet, Anatolia, first half or middle of the 15th century.[2]
		Phoenix and dragon carpet Anatolia first half or middle 15th century
Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saint Peter and Saint Paul, c. 1430. Samuel H. Kress Collection This small panel is one of the first in Siena to reflect the innovations of the Florentine painter Masaccio. Masaccio used light and perspective to give his figures weight and three-dimensionality, a sense of being in a space rather than simply on a painted surface. Domenico lit his scene from a source that comes strongly and consistently from the upper left, giving his Virgin and child a tactile reality. Their halos, tilted in perspective, help define the space. So does the niche behind them, which is inspired by ancient architecture. Domenico's use of light, perspective, and classical motifs suggest that he painted this after seeing the work of Masaccio and others in Florence. He is unlikely to have studied there, however; other elements of his work are typically Sienese, for example, the bright pastel pinks for the niche. Domenico's experiments were not taken up by his contemporaries, but they did influence artists in the next generation.'[1]
[1] Madonna and Child Enthroned with Saint Peter and Saint Paul (c. 1430) - Tempera on panel, 53 x 31 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington, USA [2] Oriental carpets in Renaissance painting \| Carpets of Middle-Eastern origin, either from the Ottoman Empire, the Levant or the Mamluk state of Egypt or Northern Africa, were used as important decorative features in paintings from the 14th century onwards. Such carpets were often integrated into Christian imagery as symbols of luxury and status of Middle-Eastern origin, and together with Pseudo-Kufic script offer an interesting example of the integration of Eastern elements into Renaissance painting and of Islamic influences on Christian art. Most carpets use Islamic geometric designs, with the earliest ones also using animal patterns such as the originally Chinese-inspired "phoenix-and-dragon", as in Domenico di Bartolo's Marriage of the Foundlings (1440). These had been stylised and simplified into near-geometric motifs in their transmission to the Islamic world. They have disappeared from paintings by about the end of the 15th century. Only a handful of original animal-pattern carpets survive, mostly also from European churches, where their rarity presumably preserved them.

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