Gail Solberg’s massive two-volume monograph on the life and work of Sienese Trecento painter Taddeo di Bartolo makes a persuasive argument for the reconsideration and reassessment of the painter’s position in the history of Italian painting in the early Renaissance. Although Taddeo has long had the distinction of being the only Sienese painter of his generation mentioned in Vasari’s Lives, his posthumous reputation has long kept him doubly marginalized in the annals of the Renaissance. Taking its cue from Vasari, the scholarly trajectory of Renaissance art historiography has always been focused on Florence, favouring the startlingly naturalistic inclinations of the heirs of Giotto over what has been characterized as the persistent Gothic-inspired linearism and decorative flourishes of the Sienese, typically characterized by Duccio and Simone Martini. In a contest between Florence and Siena, the Florentines usurped the future and the Sienese remained frozen in a kind of golden provincialism. Taddeo remained relegated to the secondary Sienese school, a provincial plodder forever overshadowed by the brilliant calligraphic chrysography of the brilliant Simone.
Among the various binary narrative tropes that assert themselves in art history are the artist ahead of his time and the artist who lags behind. Vasari made much of Perugino’s inability to cross the threshold into the true Renaissance, while his pupil Raphael surged ahead. Describing Taddeo’s work, Vasari says the artist spent much of his career holding “ever to one unchanging manner,” and in his final years in Siena applied himself “so zealously to the studies of his art, in order to become an able painter, that it can be affirmed, if perchance he did not realize his intention, that this was certainly not by reason of any defect or negligence that he showed in his work, but rather through indisposition caused by an internal obstruction, which afflicted him in a manner that he could not attain to the fulness of his desire” (Vasari as translated by de Vere [1912-1915], Vol. 2, 59-65). Wrongly identifying Domenico Bartoli as Taddeo’s nephew and pupil, he observes, in closing, that Domenico “painted with greater and better mastery” than his uncle ever could (ibid.).
As a means of refuting the somewhat tepid reviews that characterized Taddeo’s critical fortunes after Vasari, Solberg quotes the distinguished twentieth and twenty-first-century scholar of thirteenth-century Italian painting, Hayden MacGinnis: “As much as we may try to impose interpretive patterns, pictures have a troublesome way of asserting their independence and of demanding reassessment” (II, 18). Solberg’s reassessments are the result of a meticulous reconstruction of Taddeo’s biography and chronology, based on newly discovered documents and on the reinterpretation of known documents in light of his re-examined, and enormous, corpus. Such work is not without its risks; Solberg acknowledges that she “exercised imagination in line with the political, social and economic conditions” of the time “to complement Taddeo’s story” (I, 24) and that her overall objective is to assert Taddeo’s importance in the wake of relative critical neglect (I, 22). To do that, she weaves a detailed narrative that traces Taddeo’s tireless travels throughout Tuscany, Liguria, Umbria, and even Rome. In many instances, she demonstrates the extent to which Taddeo molded his practice to regional tastes, including variations in carpentry which were resolutely local (I, 93). Those structural differences, driven by traditional practices, required Taddeo to paint novel supports, a feat requiring constant adaptation and pictorial reconfigurations. In other words, Taddeo’s might not have been an art of revolutionary innovation, but one of considered, consistent change. The polyptych is a wildly variable format that demands simultaneous flexibility and cohesion, and Solberg brilliantly foregrounds how Taddeo married form to structure, creating seamless and subtle dialectical variations across his oeuvre, allowing the works to speak to their local audiences. Taddeo’s innate sympathy to the specificity of place is perhaps best echoed in the many cityscapes he incorporated into his work; from the bird’s-eye view of Rome in his 1414 fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, to the model of San Gimignano held by the saint in his polyptych of 1401 (Palazzo Communale picture gallery, San Gimignano), to St Antilia holding a model of Montepulciano in the right compartment of the Assumption triptych for the Collegiata at Montepulciano (1401, Montepulciano Cathedral).
Throughout the text, Solberg reminds us of the renewed attention her scholarship has brought to Taddeo’s work, referring to a number of restoration projects catalyzed by her work, memorably highlighted by the 2020 monographic exhibition, Taddeo di Bartolo at the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, in Perugia, focused on the surviving panels of the San Francesco al Prato altarpiece, thirteen of which are in the museum’s collection (reviewed by Brandon Strelkhe, Burlington Magazine, Vol. 162, No. 1410 (Sept. 2020), 795-797). That reconstructive exhibition, and reconsiderations of other projects, invite further speculation and study through evolving digital technologies.
These are the kinds of comprehensive, vastly detailed, and meticulously researched tomes that remind me of my early years as a student of Renaissance art history and of the long, happy hours spent in rapturous contemplation of wondrous images drawing me to the past. Everything is here; a complete catalogue of documents, a detailed chronology, a comprehensive bibliography of sources, and a host of glorious reproductions. It’s hard to describe the kind of devoted, voluntary scholarly labour that sustained those long-ago student hours of looking, except to say that they were motivated by the meticulous and similarly devoted scholarship of researchers like Gail Solberg.