Heads of angels

Bartolomeo Bulgarini was a significant artist in mid-14th century Siena. A number of commissions are documented in sources of the time, including works for the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, though none are these are known to have survived. It was Millard Meiss in 1936 who first discovered the true identity of Bulgarini, his oeuvre having previously been given to an anonymous hand known as ‘Ugolino Lorenzetti’ – a name coined by Bernard Berenson in 1917 that was intended to reflect the joint influence of Ugolino di Nerio and Pietro Lorenzetti. Two of these tondi were once part of the collection of Baron Paul Hatvany, a Hungarian exile whose family came to England just before the Second World War. In his house at Cadogan Place he built an important collection of Old Master pictures and drawings that included Giovanni Bellini’s Madonna and Child (Southampton, Art Gallery) and Rubens’s Jacob and Esau (Edinburgh, National Gallery of Scotland).