The Blinding of St Victor

Bartolomeo Bulgarini's Blinding of St. Victor, painted around 1351, depicts a scene of martyrdom from the life of the early Christian saint. Bulgarini was a leading Sienese painter of the mid-fourteenth century who continued the expressive tradition of Duccio and the Lorenzetti brothers, adapting it to the more somber emotional tone that characterized art after the Black Death. Such hagiographic narrative panels typically formed part of predella sequences beneath larger altarpieces.

Executed in tempera and gold on panel, the scene conveys dramatic narrative through compressed figural groupings and expressive gestures. Bulgarini's firm line and saturated colors, combined with the gold ground, demonstrate the continuity of Sienese Gothic painting conventions in the post-plague generation.