Andrea di Bartolo

Andrea di Bartolo was born in Siena, most likely between 1358 and 1370; no exact birth date is recorded in the scholarly literature. He was the son and pupil of the painter Bartolo di Fredi, and he trained in his father's Siena workshop under the master apprentice system typical of the period; no formal school or degree applies to his education. His first documented professional activity dates to 1389, when he collaborated with his father and the painter Luca di Tomme on an altarpiece for the shoemakers' guild in Siena Cathedral.

Over a career that ran from 1389 to 1428, Andrea di Bartolo worked primarily in Siena but also produced commissions for patrons in the Veneto, including Venice. He specialized in devotional subjects, among them the Madonna of Humility, the Crucifixion, and images of saints, executed in tempera and gold on panel; he is also credited with manuscript illumination and stained glass design. He is recorded as the teacher of Sano di Pietro, who became one of the leading Sienese painters of the following generation.

Andrea di Bartolo died in Siena in 1428. The Enciclopedia dell'Arte Medievale entry in Treccani, citing the scholar De Nicola (1921), gives the specific date of 3 June 1428; other standard references, including the English and Italian Wikipedia entries, confirm the year but do not independently verify the day and month.

Because Andrea di Bartolo worked six centuries ago, there is no body of contemporary art criticism in the modern sense, and no verbatim quotation from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. Scholarly reference sources, including the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and Treccani, place him among the important second generation Sienese Gothic painters and note that his later work is stylistically close to that of Taddeo di Bartolo, at times difficult to distinguish from it. His continued presence in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Walters Art Museum, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, and other institutions is the clearest available measure of his standing.

Andrea di Bartolo's market is thin and specialized, consistent with an artist whose surviving output is small and largely absorbed into museum collections. Auction houses and dealer indexes, including Lempertz, Invaluable, and MutualArt, show a documented market for his panels, but no single confirmed top price, work title, and sale date could be verified from public sources as of this writing. A 2015 New York Times report noted a panel then estimated at about EUR 25,000 that sold in a European sale, a price the article compared to a USD 25,000 Banksy print sold at Phillips; the article did not disclose an exact hammer price, house, or date. Collectors should treat any specific record price cited elsewhere with caution until it can be confirmed against a named auction house, lot, and date.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Andrea di Bartolo, and attribution depends on connoisseurship and museum curatorial review rather than a certificate program, a complication increased by the close stylistic relationship between his work, his father's workshop, and that of Taddeo di Bartolo. The auction market is small and public sources do not currently support a confirmed record price, work, or sale date; prices for his panels are set case by case at auction houses that handle Old Master material, such as Lempertz and Dorotheum. Collectors should also be aware that sources use several forms of his name, including Andrea di Bartolo Cini and Andrea di Bartolo di Bargilla, which can fragment auction records across databases if not cross-checked.