Niccolò di Segna

It was Niccolò di Segna’s fate from the very day he was born that he should become an artist. His father, Segna di Bonaventura, was not only painter himself but also Duccio di Buoninsegna’s nephew. Niccolò and his brother Francesco trained in their father’s workshop, as we can see from their earliest work, although we can also detect in that work an echo of the style of Ugolino di Nerio (Siena, c. 1285-1339).

The first document in which the painter is mentioned is a two-year rental agreement for a workshop in Siena, dated 4 November 1331. The document, in which he is described as “Niccolaus pictor olim Segne pictoris de Senis”, shows not only that he was now working under his own steam but also that he was an adult – thus, over 21 – and able to sign contracts. This allows us to place his birth some time in the early 14th century.

His earliest independent commission was for Polyptych no. 38 (now split between the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena and the Galleria Cini in Venice), which reveals a debt to the aristocratic style of the angels in Simone Martini’s Maestà and on which 17th-century witnesses claim to have still been able to read his signature, although this has unfortunately now disappeared. The painter also added the dates 1336 to a Madonna and Child from the Chapel of San Galgano (now in the Museo Diocesano in Chiusdino) and 1345 to the painted Crucifix he made for the Abbey of San Michele in Poggio (now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena), the only surviving work to bear his signature. In those same years Niccolò was also working on frescoes for the Pieve di Santi Leonardo e Cristoforo a Monticchiello (in the province of Siena) and in the Spinelli Chapel in Santa Maria dei Servi in Siena.

Documents dated 1346 and 1348 testify to his activity in two churches in Borgo Sansepolcro: Sant’Agostino and San Giovanni Evangelista. It was for San Giovanni Evangelista that he painted what is probably his most important work, the Polyptych of the Resurrection, for which he drew his inspiration from the style of Pietro Lorenzetti, starting with the identical shape of the central panel, and employing compositions similar to those used by Lorenzetti in the Lower Church of San Francesco in Assisi. The date of 1350 on a small Biccherna panel now in a private collection and attributed to Niccolò di Segna calls into question the contention that he died during the plague of 1348.