Bartolomeo Bulgarini

A. Tollin, Paris;

His sale, Paris, Georges Petit, 20 May 1897, lot 106 (as Italian School, beginning of the 15th century, one of a pair);

Private collector, France;

Her estate sale ("from the Estate of Madame G"), Paris, Piasa, 14 December 1998, lot 3 (as one of a pair);

With Carlo de Carlo, Florence;

With Lisa de Carlo, Florence;

From whom acquired by the present owner, 2011.

The Sienese painter Bartolomeo Bulgarini executed this refined roundel of Saint Dominic, holding both a red book, indicative of his erudition, and a white lily, symbolic of his spiritual purity, in the mid-fourteenth century. Originally part of a multi-paneled polyptych, the panel, depicting the saint with distinctive features and a tonsured head, would have comprised either a predella or pointed gable. A pupil of Pietro Lorenzetti, and among the leading Sienese painters of the mid-fourteenth century, Bulgarini produced the tondo, with stylized decorative details and a finely punched halo, between 1355 and 1365, when the influence of Simone Martini’s elegant linearity was strongest. 

Bulgarini spent his entire career in Siena, where he received commissions from the city’s most important civic and religious organizations, including the Palazzo Pubblico, the Ospedale of Santa Maria della Scala, and the Cathedral. For the latter he produced the Saint Victor altarpiece, the last of four such works dedicated to the city’s patron saints (with those representing Saints Ansanus, Sabinus, and Crescentius executed by Simone Martini and Lippi Memmi, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, respectively).

In the 1930s Millard Meiss reconstituted Bulgarini’s oeuvre by uniting what had previously formed the corpuses of two distinct anonymous artists:¹ "Ugolino Lorenzetti" (an artistic personality so-named by Bernard Berenson due to stylistic affinities with both Ugolino da Nerio and Pietro Lorenzetti²) and the "Master of the Ovile Madonna" (so-named by Ernest DeWald based on a work then in the Church of San Pietro Ovile and now in the Museo Diocesano, Siena³).

The last time this roundel was offered at auction, it was accompanied by a depiction of Saint Peter Martyr, among Saint Dominic's closest disciples.

¹ See M. Meiss, “Ugolino Lorenzetti,” in Art Bulletin 13 (1931), pp. 376-397; M. Meiss, “Bartolommeo Bulgarini altrimento detto ‘Ugolino Lorenzetti?’” in Rivista d’Arte 18 (1936), pp. 113-136.

² B. Berenson, “Ugolino Lorenzetti,” in Art in America 5 (1916-1917), pp. 259-275; B. Berenson, “Ugolino Lorenzetti,” in Art in America 6 (1917-1918), pp. 25-52.

³ E. DeWald, “The Master of the Ovile Madonna,” in Art Studies 1 (1923), pp. 45-54.