Nardo di Cione

Nardo di Cione (c. 1320-1365/66) was a Florentine painter and one of the most important artists working in the generation after Giotto. He was the brother of Andrea di Cione, known as Orcagna, and the two frequently collaborated on major commissions in Florence. Nardo was enrolled in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, the guild that included painters, by 1343.

His masterpiece is the monumental fresco cycle in the Strozzi Chapel of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, depicting the Last Judgment, Paradise, and Hell, completed around 1357. These frescoes, inspired partly by Dante's Divine Comedy, demonstrate Nardo's gift for organizing vast compositions with numerous figures arranged in a clear spatial hierarchy. His style is characterized by softer modeling and more lyrical expression than his brother Orcagna's work, with a particular sensitivity to color harmonies. Nardo died during the recurrence of plague in Florence in 1365 or 1366, leaving behind a body of work that helped define Florentine painting in the decades between Giotto and the International Gothic.

Nardo di Cione's paintings reveal a more lyrical and emotionally sensitive temperament than his more famous brother Orcagna, creating works of deeper contemplative beauty within the same post-plague Florentine tradition. His mastery is most fully demonstrated in the monumental Strozzi Chapel frescoes in Santa Maria Novella — a vast undertaking comprising the Last Judgment, Paradise, and Hell across three walls, inspired by Dante's cosmology. Here Nardo demonstrates his exceptional gift for organizing multitudes of figures across enormous surfaces while maintaining individual characterization and emotional variety.

His fresco technique shows confident command of the buon fresco method: broad architectural organization established in the sinopia underdrawing, then executed in giornate that work systematically across the surface while maintaining tonal consistency. His tempera panels display a softer, more graduated modeling than Orcagna's work, with a particular sensitivity to the treatment of facial expressions — his figures convey a range of spiritual states from serene beatitude to tormented suffering with genuine psychological insight. His palette tends toward subtler harmonies than Orcagna's more authoritative contrasts, with soft blues, warm flesh tones, and delicate rose creating a more contemplative devotional mood.

Nardo di Cione was one of the most gifted Florentine painters of the mid-fourteenth century and the creator of the most ambitious surviving fresco program in Florence from the period between Giotto and Masaccio. The Strozzi Chapel cycle, with its Dantesque program and masterful organization of vast multifigure compositions, represents a high point of post-Giottesque Florentine painting.

His death in the plague recurrence of 1365-66 robbed Florence of one of its most promising artistic personalities at a moment when his art was still developing. His son Mariotto di Nardo continued the family workshop, transmitting the Cione tradition into the following generation. The contrast between Nardo's more lyrical approach and Orcagna's more hieratic severity documents the range of expressive possibilities within the Florentine Gothic tradition, demonstrating that even within a single family workshop, individual artistic personalities could produce meaningfully different results.