Neri di Bicci
Neri di Bicci kept a diary. Not the private kind, but a meticulous record of every commission that passed through his Florence workshop: the names of patrons, the dimensions of panels, the colors mixed, the prices paid, even the type of carpentry used for frames. He wrote in that diary from the 10th of March, 1453 until the 24th of April, 1475, filling 189 pages. When he died in 1491, no painter in the fifteenth century had left behind anything like it. The diary, labeled "D" and preserved today in the library of the Uffizi Gallery, is still the most extensive document of its kind from that era.
What made Neri remarkable was not just the record, but the world it revealed. He painted for everyone: noble families and small shopkeepers, abbots and ordinary parish priests, government offices and humble country churches. He trained pupils who went on to fame of their own. He worked in a city that was reinventing painting, and he chose, deliberately, to do things the old way. How a man so methodical, so conservative, so prolific could become indispensable to historians while remaining less celebrated than his apprentices is the question his story raises.
Lorenzo di Bicci, Neri's grandfather, was a contemporary of Jacopo di Cione and Niccolo di Pietro Gerini. His work survives in collections from Baltimore to Rome, from Nashville's Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery to the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. His son Bicci di Lorenzo surpassed even him in output, and Bicci's own son Neri would complete the three-generation chain.
Neri was born in 1419, the third in this unbroken line. He spent much of his youth in Bicci's workshop, learning the family trade and absorbing a style that had been shaped across two lifetimes before his own began. In 1434, at the age of fifteen, he joined the Compagnia di San Luca, the Florentine painters' confraternity. His first documented collaboration came five years later, in 1439, when he worked alongside his father on the trompe-l'oeil funerary monument to Luigi Marsili in Florence Cathedral. The following year he again collaborated with Bicci on an Annunciation in San Angelo a Legnaia.
By 1444, Neri was working more or less independently. The triptych he produced that year for the Villani family chapel in Santissima Annunziata, Florence, shows how quickly his style had moved. Its central panel ended up at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; its side panels went to the Allen Memorial Art Museum of Oberlin College and the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence. Critics have noted its debt to Fra Filippo Lippi in composition and to Paolo Schiavo in figural style. Bicci di Lorenzo died in 1452, leaving Neri in charge of the workshop and, with it, the obligations of a family name built over three generations.
On the 4th of May, 1453, a fourteen-year-old named Cosimo Rosselli began his apprenticeship in Neri's workshop. The diary records it precisely. Rosselli was the first of many. In 1458, Giusto d'Andrea arrived and stayed at least two years before joining the Compagnia di San Luca. That same year, Francesco Botticini signed a one-year contract to study there.
Botticini lasted only nine months, leaving in July 1460, possibly because his own father had already given him some training. He went on to paint the famous Assumption of the Virgin with Saints and the Angelic Hierarchies and earned a mention in Vasari's Lives of the Artists. In 1460, Cosimo Rosselli's cousin Bernardo di Stefano Rosselli also collaborated with Neri on a series of workshop paintings. Other documented pupils include Stagio di Taddeo d'Antonio, Dionigi d'Andrea di Bernardo di Lottino, and Giosuè di Santi.
The volume of work was extraordinary. The workshop is recorded as producing more than fifty Madonna and Child paintings and the Virgin with the girdle seven times. Demand outgrew the original space: on the 22nd of November, 1458, Neri rented a second workshop at the Porta Rossa in the centre of Florence. The extra room allowed larger paintings and more clients. The Ricordanze show commissions flowing in from artisans of the Chianti region, noble families like the Spini, Soderini, and Rucellai, small Florentine shopkeepers, abbots of the Vallombrosans, and parish priests from the surrounding countryside.
On the 25th of November, 1459, Neri received a commission for an altarpiece depicting the Coronation of the Virgin with Eleven Saints for the church of the monastery of Santa Felice. The piece now hangs in the Accademia of Florence, notable for its large scale and the number of figures it contains. Neri layered a medieval gold ground beneath modern Renaissance elements, a combination typical of the way he navigated the two visual worlds of his era.
Four years earlier, Neri had taken on what the records describe as the most prestigious commission of the 1450s: a tabernacle to house a copy of Justinian's Digest in Greek, installed in the Sala dell'Udienza of the Palazzo della Signoria and depicting Moses and the Four Evangelists. That work was later destroyed.
On the 6th of August, 1456, Bartolomeo di Lucha Martini commissioned an altarpiece of the Virgin and Child with six saints. The resulting panel now hangs in the chapel of St. James Cathedral in Seattle and is one of the few works by Neri in the United States. It underwent significant restoration at the Seattle Art Museum in 2004. The painting's unusual detail is the bent arm of the infant Christ, who reaches into his mother's blouse in a gesture suggesting the Virgin lactans, a nursing Virgin. On the 6th of June, 1460, Bartolommeo Lenzi commissioned a Coronation of the Virgin with Saints for the church of the Innocent. The figures in that panel show the clear influence of Andrea del Castagno, rendered with an unusual freedom of movement.
In 1471, the Palla family commissioned an altarpiece for their chapel in Santo Spirito in Florence. A record in Neri's workshop book dated the 7th of May, 1471 specifies the painting exactly: Angel Raphael and Tobias at center, Angel Michael on the right, Angel Gabriel on the left, and a small crucifixion scene below. The Palla family's choice of subject was almost certainly deliberate. At the time it was customary for a family to commission a Tobias painting when a young member was leaving home for work or study. Raphael guiding Tobias carried a specific meaning: a prayer for safe passage. The painting uses tempera on panel with red undertones throughout, which contrast the gold leaf and make it appear brighter.
Vasari placed Neri among the last of the Giottoesque painters, meaning those still working in the tradition Giotto had established in the 13th century using gold grounds. In Neri's case, this was a conscious conservatism rather than ignorance of what surrounded him. Florence in the 1450s and 1460s was alive with new approaches, and Neri absorbed some of them while holding firmly to others.
His figures carry a signature set of features: long narrow eyes half-covered by heavy eyelids, finely arched eyebrows, straight noses, sharply outlined mouths, and long thin fingers with square nails. The Madonna, whenever she appears, has an oval elongated face. Robes are painted thickly, giving the cloth a stiff, almost metallic quality. These traits appear consistently across works identified as his, which is precisely how Victor Lasareff, curator of the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, was able to attribute two previously unidentified paintings to Neri when his findings were published in 1933. One, the Madonna della Cintola, had been recorded only as the work of an unknown artist. Its cold light and unbended colors, combined with those characteristic facial features, matched Neri's hand. The second, The Madonna with a Child Holding a Pomegranate, has richer coloring and more realistic shading than the first, with faces rendered in pinkish yellow rather than the cooler tones of the Cintola.
1452 marks a visible shift. Before his father's death that year, Neri's work showed the freshness and ornamental density of a young artist still finding his voice. Afterward, he began drawing more systematically on Renaissance forms. By the late part of his career, those borrowed forms had become, in the judgment of later critics, tired and repetitive. What never changed was the precision of execution that runs through every documented work.
The diary Neri kept is labeled "D" and makes regular reference to an earlier volume, "C," suggesting it was at least the fourth in a series. It covers a span of more than twenty years and records not just commissions but the professional world that surrounded them: the names, professions, and social standing of patrons; descriptions and dimensions of each work; the techniques and colors applied; the carpentry of the frames; and the prices paid.
Because of these records, historians know of works by Neri that have never been physically located. The breadth of his clientele alone would have been difficult to reconstruct from surviving objects. The Ricordanze identify noble patrons alongside abbots, guild members alongside parish priests, families from the city alongside artisans from the Chianti countryside. No comparable document from a fifteenth-century Italian painter survives at this length or in this detail.
Neri died in 1491. He had four sons and two daughters. None of the children became painters; they turned instead to the mercantile business, and the artistic dynasty that began with Lorenzo di Bicci ended with Neri. He is buried in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine. One of the last payments recorded in the diary came on the 1st of April, 1488, when Neri received eight bushels of grain from Santa Maria Monticelli in exchange for a painting. A month later, on the 10th of May, he received payment for a frontal depicting the Legend of St. Francis and the Building of the Santa Maria degli Angeli, a work that has since been lost.
Giorgio Vasari, writing his Lives of the Artists, devoted a joint biography to the Bicci family but got the genealogy wrong. He described Neri as Lorenzo's second son, making him Bicci's brother rather than his son. The error meant that much of Bicci's work was incorrectly attributed to Neri for generations.
The correction came in 1768, when Domenico M. Manni published his edition of Baldinucci's Notizie dei professori del disegno and untangled the family tree. Despite this, the mistake persisted. Gaetano Milanesi repeated it in his 1878 commentary on Vasari's Vite, and the early twentieth-century scholars who built the modern scholarly corpus of Neri's work, including Bernard Berenson, carried the confusion forward.
Today, Neri's standing among art historians rests less on the quality of individual paintings than on the Ricordanze as a historical document. The diary remains the most extensive record of its kind from the fifteenth century, preserved in the Uffizi library and still consulted by researchers tracing the social and economic world of Florentine painting. The altarpiece he completed on the 25th of November, 1459 for Santa Felice, now in the Accademia, stands as one example of a body of work that the Ricordanze themselves make it possible to see whole.
Common questions
Who was Neri di Bicci and when did he live?
Neri di Bicci was an Italian painter born in 1419 and died in 1491, active in Florence throughout his career. He was the son of Bicci di Lorenzo and the grandson of Lorenzo di Bicci, forming the third generation of a dynasty of Florentine painters.
What are the Ricordanze of Neri di Bicci?
The Ricordanze are a 189-page workshop diary Neri kept from the 10th of March, 1453 to the 24th of April, 1475. They record commissions, patron names and social status, descriptions and dimensions of works, techniques and prices, and are the most extensive such document from a fifteenth-century painter. The diary is preserved in the library of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.
What is Neri di Bicci's painting style known for?
Neri di Bicci used the old gold-ground technique associated with Giotto, leading Vasari to call him one of the last Giottoesque painters. His figures have consistent signature features: long narrow eyes half-covered by heavy eyelids, finely arched eyebrows, long thin fingers with square nails, and stiffly painted robes. Madonnas in his work always have an oval, elongated face.
Who were the famous pupils who trained at Neri di Bicci's workshop?
Francesco Botticini studied at Neri's workshop after signing a one-year contract but left in July 1460 after nine months. He later painted the famous Assumption of the Virgin with Saints and the Angelic Hierarchies and was mentioned in Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Cosimo Rosselli began his apprenticeship on the 4th of May, 1453 at the age of fourteen.
Where are works by Neri di Bicci located today?
Works by Neri di Bicci are held in collections across Europe and the United States. The central panel of his 1444 Villani family triptych is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. An altarpiece commissioned in 1456 hangs in the chapel of St. James Cathedral in Seattle, one of the few works by Neri in the United States. Additional works are in the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, the Uffizi, and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa.
Why was Neri di Bicci confused with other members of the Bicci family in art history?
Giorgio Vasari incorrectly described Neri as Lorenzo di Bicci's second son rather than his grandson, making Neri appear to be Bicci di Lorenzo's brother instead of his son. This caused much of Bicci's work to be misattributed to Neri. The error was corrected in 1768 by Domenico M. Manni but was repeated by Gaetano Milanesi in 1878 and by early twentieth-century scholars including Bernard Berenson.
All sources
6 references cited across the entry
- 2bookThe Robert Lehman Collection I. Italian PaintingsJohn Pope- Hennessy — The Metropolitan Museum of Art — 1987
- 4bookRenaissance art in focus : Neri di Bicci and devotional painting in ItalyElizabeth Darrow — Seattle Art Museum — 2004
- 5bookRenaissance Art in Focus: Neri di Bicci and Devotional Painting in Italy.Elizabeth Darrow — Seattle Art Museum — 2004