Although his name occurs in documents for the first time in the years between 1346 and 1348, when he enrolled in the Arte dei Medici e Speziali (the Florentine guild to which painters also belonged),[1] Nardo, brother of the painters Andrea and Jacopo , was already considered one of the leading painters of his city by midcentury.[2] An artist whose paintings have been described as fragile, delicate, dreamy, or remote , characterized by a peculiar, “lyrical mood,”[3] Nardo must have been trained under the influence of such painters as Maso and Stefano. Of the few works by his hand cited in the documents, only the fragments of a cycle of frescoes in the Oratorio del Bigallo in Florence, commissioned in 1363, have survived, but it has been argued, probably correctly, that an image of the Madonna formerly in the Ufficio della Gabella dei Contratti, once signed and dated 1356, can be identified with the panel of the Madonna and Child with four saints now in the Brooklyn Museum in New York.[4] It is also certain that the painter made his will in May 1365 and that by the following year he was already reported dead.
Nardo di Cione, Madonna and Child, with Saints Peter and John the Evangelist, and Man