Bernardo Daddi

Bernardo Daddi worked in the shadow of Giotto, the painter who had just taught Florence how to give holy figures real weight and feeling, and he may have trained in Giotto's shop. What Daddi did with that lesson was turn it into a business. He ran the largest painting workshop in the city and became the painter of choice for Florence's religious brotherhoods and for private buyers who wanted small gold-ground panels to pray before at home.

His best-known work still stands where it was meant to. Around 1347 he painted a Madonna and Child for Orsanmichele, a grain market in the city centre that doubled as a shrine, to replace an older image people believed could work miracles.

Daddi died in 1348, almost certainly in the Black Death that carried off perhaps half of Florence. The plague made his Madonna suddenly famous. Terrified survivors left huge sums to Orsanmichele, and the brotherhood spent part of that windfall on the elaborate carved marble tabernacle that frames his painting to this day.