Barnaba da Modena

Barnaba da Modena took his name from the city where he was born, in northern Italy, but he made his career on the coast, in Genoa, where the records first find him in the early 1360s already a citizen and hiring Tuscan assistants. In a busy port full of painters he became the one everyone wanted.

His pictures look deliberately old even for their day. Long after Giotto had made figures solid and human, Barnaba held onto the Byzantine manner learned from icons: gold backgrounds, Madonnas with long straight noses and grave dark eyes, mantles lit with fine gold lines like cracked enamel. Into it he blended the softness of the Sienese painting he knew from Tuscany.

He worked mostly for the Franciscan and Dominican friars across Liguria, Piedmont and Pisa, turning out altarpieces and small folding diptychs and triptychs by the dozen. One commission carried him all the way to Pisa in 1380 to finish a fresco cycle. Around 50 of his signed and dated panels survive, enough that his devout, gold-heavy Madonnas can be traced from museum to museum across Europe.