Bartolomeo Bulgarini

Bartolomeo Bulgarini

Italian artist, Siena school.
Country: Italy

Biography of Bartolomeo Bulgarini

Italian artist, Sienese school. Bartolomeo Bulgarini is mentioned in Giorgio Vasari's "Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects". Vasari reports that Bartolomeo was a student of Pietro Lorenzetti and even painted a portrait of his teacher, which was previously kept in Siena. For a long time, it was believed that Bartolomeo Bulgarini's works did not survive. However, this artist was "rediscovered". His "discoverer", the famous connoisseur of Italian art Bernard Berenson, initially identified a group of stylistically similar paintings, but not knowing the author's name, came up with the fictional name "Ugolino Lorenzetti" for him due to the similarity of these paintings to the style of Ugolino di Nerio and Pietro Lorenzetti. Another group of paintings, partially coinciding with the one identified by Berenson, was attributed by another researcher, Devauld, to an anonymous master whom he called "Maestro d'Ovile" (from the painting that was located in the Sienese church of San Pietro a Ovile). In 1936, both groups of paintings were identified as the work of Bartolomeo Bulgarini. There is not a single signed work by Bartolomeo Bulgarini. In the inventory description of the Sienese Cathedral made in the 16th century, an artist named Bulgarni is mentioned as the author of the painting "Nativity", which adorned the altar of St. Victor (each of the four patron saints of Siena has its own separate altar in the cathedral, and the altar of St. Victor is one of them). Among the authors who painted pictures for these altars, such first-class artists as Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi ("Annunciation" - now in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence), Pietro Lorenzetti ("Birth of Mary" - Siena, Cathedral), and his brother Ambrogio Lorenzetti can be mentioned. Over time, specialists agreed that the "Nativity" mentioned in the 16th-century inventory description is the painting "Adoration of the Shepherds," which is kept in Cambridge, at the Fogg Art Museum, and is dated approximately 1350. The painting suffered significant damage over time from rough renovations and the sawing off of edges. In this work, one can see a skillful balance between the two-dimensional flatness characteristic of Sienese painting of the 14th century and the illusory depth of the painting's space created with the help of two thin columns. In Sienese and Florentine archival documents, Bartolomeo is mentioned several times from 1337 to 1378. In 1345, his name appears in connection with minor works; in 1349, according to documents, he painted frescoes in the Porta di Camollia (city gates of Siena); these frescoes did not survive, just like the paintings he created for the Chapel of St. Sylvester in the Florentine church of Santa Croce and for the Sienese hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, which are mentioned in the documents. In 1363, Bartolomeo Bulgarni's name appears in the list of the guild of Sienese painters, and the record from 1370 reports that the master, together with his wife, joins the brotherhood at the Sienese hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, which was not so much a hospital in the modern sense but a charitable organization, a refuge for the suffering and an orphanage for abandoned children. From this moment until the end of his life, Bartolomeo was associated with this pious Sienese public institution. The record from September 4, 1378, reports his death.

Based on the technical characteristics of the paintings of that era, an assumption, gaining more and more supporters, arose that after the plague epidemic of 1348, Bartolomeo Bulgarini headed the largest artistic workshop in Siena, where works of many famous Sienese masters were produced. Bulgarini created paintings not only for Sienese institutions, such as the cathedral or the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala (for which he painted five works), but also worked in Florence, San Gimignano, Pienza, Grosseto, and Lucca. Today, his brushes are attributed to a fairly extensive range of works (mostly individual parts of dismantled altars) that are kept in the best collections in the world - the National Gallery in Washington (St. Catherine of Alexandria, c. 1335), the Louvre in Paris (Crucifixion, c. 1350), the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (Crucifixion, after 1330), the Metropolitan Museum in New York (St. Matthew and Thomas, c. 1350), the Sienese Pinacoteca (Assumption of Mary, St. Ansanus, St. Galgano, Madonna and Child, c. 1335), the museums of Germany - the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne (Madonna and Child on a Throne, c. 1350; St. Peter, c. 1350; St. Matthew, c. 1350; St. Francis) as well as in Berlin and Frankfurt. In the Christian Museum of the Hungarian city of Esztergom, his works are displayed (Moses, c. 1350, and the Prophet Daniel, c. 1350), in the largest private collections - Cressa (Madonna and Child) and Thyssen-Bornemisza (Madonna and Child with four angels and martyr saints), as well as in churches in Tuscany.

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