He and Orcagna worked together in the decoration of the Cappella Strozzi of the Santa Maria Novella.
Orcagna painted the altarpiece (dated 1357) while Nardo did the frescoes: Last Judgment {3211}, Paradise and Hell.
Nardo was the less gifted of the brothers, however, he had a distinct style, less severe than that of his brothers.
Nardo's Virgin, despite her soft expression, appears removed from human concerns.
Bright, artificial colors separate her from the real world, and the stiff saints on either side underscore her hierarchical importance.
Around the middle of the 14th century, Florentine artists like Nardo and his brothers abandoned the human concerns and naturalism of Giotto. For several decades the older, traditional styles again predominated.
Art historians continue to debate why this occurred.
Perhaps Giotto's work was only appreciated, as Petrarch believed, by a small, educated elite.
Perhaps intensified religious sentiment following the plague of 1348 -- when up to half the population of Italian cities died within a few weeks -- prompted this conservatism. Or perhaps the deaths of so many artists and patrons changed the nature of commissions and workshop practice.
Neroccio's style remains almost unchanged in his several compositions presenting the Virgin and Child with saints.
The drawing is always perceptibly subtle and light, the colours do not glow with varnish, but enchant with their unlacquered, milky opaque effect.
This painter, stemming from a distinguished patrician family, seems to have wanted throughout his life to express the nobility of the human face and the elegance of gestures and attitudes in his paintings.
He did not make use of many innovations of the first half of the 15th century, and in fact one has the impression as if Neroccio, forgetting about his direct artistic antecedents, had intended to reach back to traditions of the previous century.
And yet in fact he knew and employed the devices of perspective and used light and shadow in the modelling of his figures, but he was less interested in these.
Neroccio had no wish to deny the two-dimensisonal quality of the surface he painted, and the application of foreshortening and the adding of depth to his composition concerned him only as long and inasmuch as they contributed to the harmonious effect of the composition as a whole.
In the light that brushed the faces and hands he did not look for a method to achieve plastic unity and compactness, but rather for a means to expose as much of the beauties of detail as possible and to make the pictorial surface as rich as possible.
