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The Second City
John Haberin New York City
Siena: The Rise of Painting
Can this be the Dark Ages? Europe in 1300 was bursting with art and light.
Gothic architecture had soared into the light and brought it into the cathedral. In the quiet confines of books and illuminated manuscripts, artists were beginning to picture medieval life as never before. Philosophy, a school called Scholasticism, had blessed intellectual inquiry. It positively demanded a return to classical times and the rigor of Aristotle—in the service, of course, of true belief. And so much more was to come, if, that is, one knew where to look. How about, say, to Tuscany? 
A weak pope was facing greater challenges, even as trade routes to the East brought new goods, new ideas, and a new prosperity. And a key route, connecting France and Italy, ran right through Tuscany—in particular, though Siena. Local princes were showing their strength, and Siena was styling itself a republic dedicated to the Virgin. It also held off its chief rival, Florence, in war earning the right to try. The Renaissance was not so very far off after all, and the Met looks beyond Florence for its origins. It is "Siena: The Rise of Painting."
Not the dark ages
The Met has been building a case for Siena since 2004, when it spent $45 million on a Madonna and Child by Duccio. It was all but asking for controversy, as the surest route to publicity, and got it. The New York Times wondered at the price for a painting "no bigger than a sheet of typing paper." A professor at Columbia, James H. Beck, called it a forgery. Today the Met boasts more than ever of its treasure, and it stands apart as prologue to the exhibition. It has an intimacy and delicacy long associated with Duccio, and its very size indicates a painting not for churches, but for private devotion. One can still see the marks of candle flames on its bottom edge.
So, at any rate, the Met says, but a new era really does begin with Duccio di Buoninsegna in Siena and Giotto in Florence. Duccio's infant Jesus reaches up to his mother, affirming his, Mary's and a believer's reverence and affection. In another Madonna, the child takes hold of a golden veil, extending it to the right. It has become a token of royal grandeur. It all takes place just behind the illusion of a carved-wood parapet, setting Jesus and Mary into a space at once yours, too, and theirs alone. That establishes intimacy, too.
True, Beck finds the gesture so badly painted as to rule out the work's authenticity, the arm a mere stump. He also finds the parapet without precedent for at least another hundred years. Still, it is a wonder that anything survives as more than a stump when the entire surface is cracked, peeling, and overcleaned. And maybe, just maybe, the parapet is an innovation. As it is, there is no clear precedent for Duccio himself. He may have studied in France, Florence, or anywhere at all.
It is just the kind of dispute that has told against Siena for ever so long. It and Florence are little more than an hour apart by car, by much the same route that a trader took back then, but they could be a lifetime apart. Oh, and did I mention Giotto along with Duccio? Western art history often compares the two—in order to introduce the Renaissance in Florence. Lectures show their work on two screens, the better to explain the greatness of Giotto. And Duccio has nothing of his solid, almost columnar human forms, real spaces, and human personalities, filled with fear and love.
Not that the comparison means to write off Duccio as the last stand of medieval art—the art that Giotto surpassed. It means only to distinguish two artists and two paths to what was then the future. Still, a class may never mention Siena again. The Met is out to change that. It has a habit of throwing its weight around on behalf of new narratives and new attributions. For once, though, its expertise and arrogance may pay off.
It connects Tuscany to broader trends in Europe. It includes sculpture from Italy and France, much of it more delicate, intricate, and fully modeled than Sienese painting. It includes manuscript illumination in France by Jean Pucelle and later the Limbourg brothers. And the influence ran both ways. It has an aside for textiles, at least one of which appears in the background to a painting. That trade route was also the Silk Road.
Majesty and temptation
Against that background, the show can afford to stick to a small but significant circle of artists. Duccio had an heir in Simone Martini, a student. The brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti kept separate workshops but stayed close in style and everything else. The Met speculates that two of their panels once hung together as a diptych. (It cannot point to hinge marks or external evidence.) It ends with Martini to bring the story back to its source.
Duccio has his hand everywhere. Whenever a man at the cross raises a lance without piercing the side of Jesus, he quotes Duccio and the artist's love of crowds. In fact, pretty much any genre quotes Duccio on account of a single altarpiece, the Maestà, commissioned in 1303, with close to fifty panels. It takes its name, meaning majesty or triumph, from the largest panel, front and center, of an enthroned Madonna. The ranks of angels to either side do little but add color, like the rhythms of a song celebrating her glory. One can practically hear it.
One cannot hear much else. Losers do not write history, but artists and poets do, and they had begun to erase Siena from Renaissance history before its work ended. Dante wrote of how Cimabue in Florence, who had his own Maestà in 1280, once held the field but is now eclipsed by Giotto. (No wonder he was in Purgatory for the sin of pride.) Years later, Vasari, himself a Renaissance painter, began his Lives with just those two artists. Sometime around Vasari's birth in 1511, the dismantling of Duccio's altarpiece had already begun.
The Met reconstructs it anyway, with photographs and wall text for its front and back. It also brings together one side of the entire predella, or supporting bottom row. That may not sound impressive, but it extends the length of a wall, and it shows Duccio as an able story-teller. A predella often constructs a narrative, and this one is about the ministry of Jesus—with miracles subordinate to a commanding life. Duccio builds a story by relating one figure to another and both to a city very much like Siena. It creates a cumulative picture of a rocky landscape and farmland just outside formidable city walls.
In a panel from the Frick Collection, the devil tempts Jesus with the seven cities of the world. The black devil looks rather like a bearded Richard Nixon, and Jesus looks relaxed and impassive. Each city has its own size and design, but all crisp and candy-colored. Duccio just cannot individuate his actors all that much, and he has no room for city streets. No one really loves or suffers, and no one plays an obvious part. He does, though, have his temptations. It will take the remaining artists to have more.
Their approach is startling. Pietro Lorenzetti depicts the Crucifixion on a shaped panel with an irregular base, where a skull rests on green earth. It has an illusion of depth that brings death home while introducing painting to landscape. A more conventional panel from his brother gives the infant Jesus a fuller body and dark eyes. He looks away from his mother's breast, coy and aware. There may be a human world after all in scripture and Sienna.
Looking halfway ahead
An altarpiece by Pietro in Pieve has its own Gothic architecture, with the main panel supporting a seeming church tower, and the gold background could almost pass for sky. Ambrogio takes one inside, his three-tiered household as three acts in a domestic drama. He gives people the run of the streets. With Martini's Orsini Polyptich, the cast moves every which way in the shallow space below the cross. They spill out from the city's gates. Their gestures and props create a near chaos of competing pagans and worshippers.
The protagonists have a greater freedom and responsibility as well. Mary can draw back or look up from the angel of the Annunciation, her prayer book fallen aside. Martini's Saint John has unkempt blond hair and clasped hands, at once youthful and reserved. His Pontius Pilate may be winning the argument with Jesus. More often, his bust-length saints glower, much as for Cimabue decades before in Florence. Miracles have becomes matters of fact.
Technique has a greater variety as well. Ambrogio sketches on plaster in sinopia, the earth pigment often used for the preliminary layer that a fresco will efface. Its faint outlines have survived, though, like the first thoughts of an artist today. He also plays with gold leaf as at once background, a tooled halo, and jewelry for Mary herself. So much for the Virgin's modesty. The red of simulated marble for Pietro could pass for blood.
By 1350, all four artists and their rivals were dead. Still, the black plague was about to set in, taking perhaps a third of the population. Historians have long seen it as bringing a premature end to the Renaissance's cautious or daring beginning. Art after Giotto in Florence will look dour and disheartened as well. It can only look back. Whether Siena ever could look ahead must remain up for debate.
The curators have a lot to reconstruct and far to travel. It shows in their affiliations alone—Stephan Wolohojian of the Met, Laura Llewellyn of London's National Gallery, and Caroline Campbell of Ireland's National Gallery, with Joanna Cannon of the Courtauld Institute in London. They were bound to open with the Met's Stoclet Madonna, and they were bound to describe it in glowing terms. Mostly, though, they supply a convincing back and forth between context and the four leading artists. They also pause for large works and works in series. One need never get lost in the maze of dark walls.
They do not, though, include contact with Florence or classicism. Nicola Pisano, who worked between Florence and Pisa shortly before, was closer than those here to ancient Rome and its influence. His sculpture looks ahead to Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, Donatello, and Michelangelo in the next century. The show does stop in Assisi, but with no indication that Giotto may have worked there, and in Arezzo, but with no mention of Piero della Francesca and his frescoes there yet to come. A comparison could have added context, just as in paired slides in a lecture. The Met, though, has a case to make, a case for Siena.
"Siena: The Rise of Painting" ran at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through January 26, 2025.