The Uffizi Gallery in Florence is one of the busiest museums in the world, and it certainly is, especially when it has to be crowded with tourists taking selfies for great views of the famous Botticelli and Leonardo. I feel it. But the buzz dies down when you enter the modestly sized gallery near these paintings, which specializes in 13th-century Sienese art. Few here rush to study Duccio’s enthroned Madonna or Simone Martini’s gilded Annunciation scene.
That’s all you need to know about the somber and uncertain place where the art of Trecento Siena commands public attention. While the likes of Duccio and Martini were formal radicals of the time, experimenting with naturalism, painted text, and multiple panel formats, others still drew on the artistic heft of the Byzantine and Gothic eras. Scholars agree that he was imprisoned by But time has not been kind to these Sienese artists, who are only briefly mentioned in Art History 101 courses, and Florentine painters still exert a powerful centrifugal force.
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Giotto and Cimabue, let’s move on there. Here comes the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s long-awaited blockbuster about early Siena paintings. This first-rate exhibition has the potential to reorder this fragment of the Western canon. The exhibition, which opens on Sunday and travels to the National Gallery in London after opening in New York, is an embarrassment of riches, and not just because the art on display is of such high quality.
The exhibition’s official title, “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350,” is perhaps the most ambitious exhibition to be held in New York since the pandemic began. The fragmented masterpieces of Duccio and Martini are reunited here, and the entire altarpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti was brought from the church in Arezzo. Many of these pieces are not commonly seen in the United States. Many more are extremely rare. (This exhibition is the result of years of hard work by curators Stefan Wolohojian, Laura Llewellyn, Caroline Campbell and Joanna Cannon.)
Duccio’s work exhibited at the Siena Art Exhibition in the Met. Photo: Irene Travel/Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Consider the fact that only a dozen of Duccio’s works are known to scholars. Consider the fact that many of them are currently on display in the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Many of Duccio’s paintings here belong to the altarpiece Maestà (1308-1311), whose panels were disassembled and distributed over the centuries. The show’s greatest accomplishment was the reassembly of all eight remaining panels of the predella (the raised area at the bottom of the altarpiece). Each painting offers its own thrills, but I love the one from The Transfiguration, where Jesus Christ stands stoically on a rocky peak and his disciples look on with a mixture of wonder and horror. I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
Although Byzantine artists frequently painted this scene and many others painted by Duccio, their approach was relatively sober, with Jesus depicting a flat cosmos intended to resemble heaven. It looked like he lived in. Meanwhile, Duccio drags Jesus to the ground and pushes him onto the top of a hill, likely somewhere in Italy. The pastel pinks and greens on the disciples’ robes mark a departure from his previous gloomy brown art. The drama of his work, in which people are lined up diagonally across the surrounding rocks, is similar, with a certain Giotto-esque flourish, but one that is filtered through Duccio’s personal tastes.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344 ©Foto Studio Lensini Siena/Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena
More than 700 years later, Duccio’s paintings are still astonishing, as are most of the works by the show’s other three protagonists: Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Together with Duccio, these artists created religious works that still retain an ethereal brilliance. In the installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, these works were primarily shown in silent darkness, with many of them spotlighted, allowing them to literally shine. That’s because all four artists make extensive use of gold leaf, in some cases avoiding backgrounds altogether in favor of fields of gleaming metal.
This technology was not entirely new. Byzantine artists also relied on gold leaf, often painting the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ against monochromatic backgrounds to distance them from reality. But the joy of a painting like Martini’s Madonna and Child with Four Saints and a Dominican Nun (c. 1325) is that the work wanders between this realm and the next. The raised patterned background and the figure’s stern gaze heighten all its majestic qualities, but gravity tugs at the sleeves of the Virgin’s deep blue veil, making her look as visible as the rest of us. It reminds the viewer that they are exposed to forces that are not there.
The Virgin Mary appears repeatedly in almost every piece in the show, perhaps because the Sienese felt a particularly deep connection to her. The inhabitants of Siena believed that they were personally protected by her. The city’s seal from the mid-13th century spoke of her “loveliness” as it sought her blessing. Their religious beliefs were only confirmed in 1260 when the Sienese army unexpectedly overwhelmed their Florentine enemies in battle, which then gave way to the financial boom of the 10th century.
Duccio’s The Healing of a Man Born Blind (c. 1307/1308-1111) is one of eight paintings from his Predella Maestas featured here. ©National Gallery, London
Siena was geographically well placed to prosper. It is located in the center of Tuscany, along Via Fracigena, a pilgrimage route that runs from Canterbury in England to Rome, stopping in France and Switzerland along the way. Goods were carried along with merchants traveling this route, but so were artistic ideas, making this hub a source of stylistic hybridity.
French Gothic ivory and Central Asian textiles feature heavily in this show, which seeks to reveal the Sienese artist’s inspiration. It is undisputed, for example, that Duccio’s Biblical characters often wear clothing decorated with Islamic patterns derived from Turkish textiles. But here it is more interesting to read about the textiles than to see the textiles referenced. Their presence here underscores the already obvious fact that Duccio was adept at combining and recombining the motifs and styles of others’ art, giving them his own unique twist. I’m doing it.
Pietro Lorenzetti’s Tarlati Altarpiece (1320) departed from a church in Arezzo for the Met show. Photo: Irene Travel/Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Local influences are traced more convincingly. Although Duccio died in 1319, this exhibition proves that even after his death, his art remained highly appealing, and that others in Siena were generously plagiarized from it. is shown. Martini, for example, began producing polyptychs (altarpieces with multiple paintings) in Duccio’s style, but abandoned Duccio’s minimalism in favor of more extravagant compositions. His Orsini Polyptych (c. 1335-c. 1340) contains four paintings depicting Jesus’ final days before his resurrection, each image seemingly spilling over into the next. It looks like A parade of people in one photo appears to be heading straight from his burial site to his burial site. Martini showed that a story could unfold over multiple paintings, further demonstrating that Duccio and Giotto were on the right track.
Also important is the fact that the Orsini Polyptych was designed to be portable. You don’t have to watch it in church to enjoy its full power. Before its demolition, Duccio’s Maesta could only be seen in one place. The Orsini Polyptych, on the other hand, was initially folded so that it could be carried around by its patron, Cardinal Napoleone Orsini, who could admire the painting in private.
The Orsini Polyptych was created about a century before the Renaissance, when artists began painting secular subjects and their contemporaries. However, such works helped spread painting beyond the church and into the world beyond the church. Standing in front of the paintings of Duccio, Martini, Lorenzetti and others is the same as observing what direction the paintings will take.
Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych (c. 1335-1340) has been reunited for a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Photo: Irene Travel/Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art
And where did the paintings go? Perhaps a little more intellectual outwardly, and maybe even a little less dazzling visually. One of the joys of the Met show is the glimpse into transitional periods in painting. In Duccio’s time, the rules of perspective and composition had not yet been formally established, and paintings of his talent were still primarily intended for religious institutions. Yet he and his colleagues modified artistic conventions in such a way that the resulting frictions can still be felt today.
One of the last paintings in the exhibition, Martini’s Christ on the Cross (ca. 1340) pulses with a kind of awkwardness that is only possible when the art is still between movements . Here, blood gushes from the emaciated body of Jesus, causing scarlet rivulets to run down the cross and onto the ground below. There are no trees, clouds, animals, or people, just a gilded background and a low, rugged hill at Jesus’ feet. The life fluid of Jesus drips down the ridge of the hill. One feels that they will only continue to descend towards civilization. There is a world beyond this painting, even if it is not expressed.
