Andrea di Bartolo

Andrea di Bartolo was the middle of three generations of painters in one Sienese workshop. His father, Bartolo di Fredi, ran one of the busiest shops in the city, and his sons Giorgio and Ansano went into the same trade. The first record of Andrea, from 1389, has him working beside his father and Luca di Tommè, another Sienese master, on an altarpiece for the shoemakers' guild in Siena Cathedral. That painting is lost.

He set up on his own around 1390 and did well. Commissions came from the Dominican and Franciscan houses of Siena and from patrons as far off as the Veneto and the Marches, and he worked in fresco, stained glass and manuscript illumination as well as on panel. What he painted stayed close to what his father had taught him, gold grounds and slender figures and the old Sienese repertoire, during the decades when Florence, some 70 kilometres north, was rebuilding the whole idea of a picture around perspective.

Dated work by him is rare. A group of four saints of 1413 carries a year, and most of the rest is placed by style alone. He died in Siena on 3 June 1428, and the Coronation of the Virgin polyptych now in the Brera was a job he shared with his son Giorgio.