Nardo di Cione

Nardo di Cione, whose baptismal name was Leonardo di Cione ("Nardo" is a familiar short form of Leonardo), was a Florentine painter, and occasional sculptor and architect, active by the early 1340s. He was the brother of Andrea di Cione, known as Orcagna, and of Jacopo di Cione, and the three worked within an interconnected family workshop that dominated Florentine painting in the mid-fourteenth century.

The documentary record for Nardo is largely institutional. He matriculated in the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali, the Florentine guild associated with painters, in the mid-1340s (Britannica gives 1343 to 1344, Treccani gives 1346 to 1348), and was admitted to the guild of stonemasons in 1352. His best-documented and most significant surviving commission is the fresco cycle of The Last Judgment, Paradise, and Hell in the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, generally dated to the 1350s and attributed to him on the strength of Lorenzo Ghiberti's later testimony.

No exact birth date survives; art-historical references place his birth at approximately 1320, an estimate rather than a documented fact. His death is similarly undated to the day. Archival sources agree only that he died in Florence before 16 May 1366, the date on which his brothers carried out the provisions of his will. Some general references round this to "1365" or "1365/66," but the underlying document supports only "before 16 May 1366."

Nardo's reputation was established in his own lifetime: the 1349 letter naming him among Florence's best painters is contemporary evidence, not later reconstruction. Modern scholarship, summarized most fully in Treccani's Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, treats him as a distinct artistic personality within the family workshop, separate in temperament from the more forceful Orcagna. The Web Gallery of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington both characterize his paintings in similar terms, describing a lyrical, poetic sensibility and a delicate, sometimes dreamlike quality of color and mood, in contrast to his brother's more forceful manner. These institutional assessments, rather than reviews in the modern press, form the critical record for an artist of this period.

Nardo di Cione's market is that of a fourteenth-century Old Master: extremely thin in supply and dependent on the rare surfacing of a panel with sound provenance. Auction-tracking services such as MutualArt and Artnet list only a small handful of recorded lots, roughly three, under his name, and full sale prices are not reliably available in public, non-paywalled sources. No auction house has published a widely reported record price for the artist, so no confirmed all-time auction high can be stated here. There is no current gallery or estate representation, as is typical for an artist of this period; his market activity occurs entirely through major auction houses and, occasionally, through private treaty sale by dealers in Old Master paintings.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Nardo di Cione, and none is likely to be produced in the conventional sense; attribution rests on archival guild and testamentary records, on Ghiberti's account of the Strozzi Chapel, and on continuing scholarly connoisseurship, so provenance and prior museum or scholarly attribution carry unusual weight in any purchase decision. Collectors should also take care with the name itself: Nardo di Cione is distinct from his brothers Andrea di Cione (Orcagna) and Jacopo di Cione, both of whom have separate market histories, and distinct from a later relative, Mariotto di Nardo di Cione, an early fifteenth-century Florentine painter who appears independently at auction. Given how rarely works by Nardo di Cione are offered and how little public price data exists, any reported sale should be treated as an isolated data point rather than evidence of an established price trend.