Bartolo di Fredi Cini Place Unknown, Date Unknown; Active 1353 - 1410 Siena

G. Freuler, "Lippo Memmi's New Testament Cycle in the Collegiata in San Gimignano, " in Arte Cristiana, vol. 713, 1986, p. 79;
G. Freuler, Bartolo di Fredi Cini, Disentis 1994, pp. 102, 441-442, cat. no. 12, illus., fig. 105 (as workshop of Bartolo di Fredi).

Bartolo di Fredi was one of the leading artists in late trecento Siena, and his considerable narrative skill and his decorative and colorful style found a strong audience there and in surrounding cities.  This small panel, originally a predella for an unknown altarpiece, depicts one of the most famous moments from the life of Saint Nicholas.  In his native city of Myra lived a poor but virtuous man, whose three beautiful daughters, due to their father’s penury, were condemned to remain spinsters (or worse) for want of a proper dowry.  Nicholas, wishing to help but too modest to do so openly, devised a scheme whereby he tossed three golden balls through the girls’ bedroom window, thus allowing them to find husbands. 

This beautiful Charity of Saint Nicholas exemplifies the Bartolo di Fredi’s style of the 1370s.  It is one of a group of three small panels that Freuler has grouped together, with panels representing The Appearance of Saint Michael in the Guise of a Bull on Mount Gargano (private collection) and a Charity of Saint Anthony Abbott (National Museum, Kiev). He further notes the similarity of the present predella with the composition of one of the artist’s frescoes of the same subject in the church of San Lucchese, Poggibonsi (see fig. 1).  The fresco and panel, although meant to be viewed from two very different vantage points, are taken from the same compositional position.  The figures of the three sleeping maids, nightcaps on heads and side by side in their curtained bed, correspond very closely in both works, as does the figure of the saint, who grasps his cloak with his left hand as he throws the ball through the transom window (although in the fresco the upper body of the figure has been somewhat damaged).  Given the naturalizing treatment of details in the present panel (along with the other two in the group), Freuler has suggested a date of the 1370s for the paintings.  They should follow the documented Fornai altarpiece of 1368 (now lost, but with two predella panels now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, inv. 98) and before his Adoration of the Magi Altarpiece painted in 1385-9 for chapel of the Tolomei family in the Sienese Duomo (various museums, main panel in Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena, inv. 104).