BULGARINI, Bartolommeo
Italian painter. Many of his paintings were attributed by Berenson to an anonymous master he called Ugolino-Lorenzetti, because of the artist’s obvious indebtedness to the work of Ugolino di Nerio and Pietro Lorenzetti. A group of paintings that partially overlapped with these was attributed by Dewald to an artist he called the Ovile Master, after a painting formerly in S Pietro a Ovile, Siena. In 1931 Meiss recognized that these works formed the oeuvre of a single artist, and in 1936 he identified this figure as Bartolommeo Bulgarini. Subsequent discoveries have confirmed Meiss’s hypothesis and established a dated work around which the rest of Bulgarini’s paintings can be studied.
A 16th-century inventory of Siena Cathedral names Bulgarini as the artist of a Nativity that stood on the altar of St Victor (one of four altars dedicated to the city’s patron saints). This must have been a prestigious commission, since the other altarpieces in the cycle are all major works by important artists: the Annunciation by Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi (Florence, Uffizi), the Birth of the Virgin by Pietro Lorenzetti (Siena, Museo dell’Opera del Duomo) and the Purification of the Virgin by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Florence, Uffizi). Bulgarini’s work has been identified with the Adoration of the Shepherds (c. 1350; Cambridge, Fogg Art Museum), which has been cut down and restored several times. Stylistically it marks a turning point in his development: the unusual composition balances a feeling for depth and monumental form derived from the Lorenzetti with a rigorous two-dimensional organization of the surface. Bulgarini himself executed the central portion and predella, while the lateral panels were painted by an anonymous follower of Simone Martini, known as the Master of the Palazzo Venezia Madonna.
