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If you want to know the moment of a medieval Italian city’s greatest prosperity, look at the year it began work on its cathedral. In Siena, the magic year was 1226, the start of some 85 years of construction of the duomo, a remarkable gothic structure with an intricately complex, creamy pink facade and stripy, black-and-white campanile. “The scale of ambition is difficult to put into words,” says Laura Llewellyn, one of the curators of The Rise of Painting, the National Gallery’s new exhibition of Sienese art. “The extravagance of it: to appreciate it you need to unknow and unlearn later buildings like the duomos in Florence and St Peter’s in Rome.”
But by the 1350s, Siena’s most glorious years in the raging Tuscan sun would be as good as over. After decades of rapid artistic transformation – a half century that saw the art of the city leave behind the distant, hieratic grace of Byzantine-flavoured painting for a world of dynamism, drama and emotion – the Black Death halved the city’s population from 60,000 to 30,000, stripped away its wilder ambitions and dulled its gleaming wealth. One of Siena’s more implausible plans had been to enlarge the already huge cathedral by converting its existing nave into a transept and tacking on to its belly a new, vastly oversized nave on the precipitous edge of one of the city’s peaks. The project was never completed, but ghostly unfinished arches remain as a monument to lost dreams and a raging pandemic.
Medieval Siena was an oligarchic republic. Even so, it was emphatically ruled by the Virgin Mary. In the city’s art, she is omnipresent. Find her with “large eyes” (the Madonna degli Occhi Grossi, dating from about 1225; the work, by an artist known as the Maestro di Tressa, bestowed victory on the Sienese in the battle of Montaperti against the Florentines in 1260). Observe her in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte, from which the infant Jesus, pressed to her breast, stares at the viewer with a watchful side-eye, bracing his tiny foot against the curve of her arm (this masterpiece will be in the London exhibition). Find her as a newborn, being lovingly washed by women who pour water from a ewer into a hexagonal basin, in an altarpiece signed by Ambrogio’s brother Pietro.
She is there, too, reclining on a couch which makes her look like an Etruscan lady on a tomb, in Giovanni Pisano’s carvings on the side of Siena Cathedral’s pulpit, the still point at the heart of an arrangement so hectic, so crowded with sheep, kings, shepherds and other dramatis personae of the nativity, that one goat has to have its poor head forced upwards against the side of the relief in order to be accommodated by the composition.
Even more magnificently, she presides over the Palazzo Pubblico – the political centre of Siena, the great stage set towards which the famous campo, or central square, rakes down. Here she is enthroned by Simone Martini on the wall of the chamber in which the city’s legislative body, the Consiglio Generale, debated; a decorous queen presiding over a court of saints, in turn hovering above a government of men.
But inside the cathedral itself is the grandest Virgin of all: the Maestà by Duccio, the glorious central climax of a magisterial altarpiece designed to enrapture its audience in a blast of detail and colour. So beloved by its commissioners was it that it was carried through the city in a triumphant procession before being installed in the church in 1311. Duccio signed the work with an inscription: “Holy Mother of God, be thou the cause of peace for Siena, and life to Duccio because he painted thee thus.” It’s a rare moment this, hearing the painter’s words fly towards us from seven centuries ago, a sentence that combines a plea for attention at the level of the state with a breathtaking claim to intimacy between painter and subject.
After the worst of the Black Death, Florence was emphatically the winner of the rivalry between itself and Siena, and Siena’s art is often seen in relation to its neighbour’s. Siena: dreamy and emotional; Florence: intellectual and vigorous. Siena’s gold-encrusted artworks are very worldly paintings that speak of abundant wealth, the best materials, no expense spared for the Virgin in this city of medieval bankers – but they seem otherworldly, too, those glinting heavens deliquescing into a shimmering celestial haze. The Rise of Painting, though, reasserts Siena as no pensive, hazy adjunct to Florence, but a centre of tumultuous innovation in the first half of the 14th century – a time of connectivity, trade, the influx of gorgeous materials and textiles and skill in goldsmithing and ivory carving.
Most importantly, perhaps, it was a also a time of rapid religious change that saw art flexing to meet the needs of a new relationship with God, instigated by the flourishing of the new mendicant religious orders – Franciscans, Dominicans – who inserted themselves into cities, tending to the sick, filling barn-like churches with crowds for charismatic sermons, and insisting, according to Caroline Campbell, one of the exhibition curators, on a religious life that was “more about doing, less about observing”. In artistic terms, that translated into paintings of action, jeopardy and feeling – an art that insisted on drawing the viewer into its exciting, perilous high-stakes world.
On the gothic facade of the cathedral, for example, the statuary is not co-opted to double up as load-bearing columns, as one would often see on a northern European equivalent. Instead, these are independent figures like actors on a stage – prophets and sibyls who incline and bend towards each other in dynamic conversation. It is hard now, at a distance of so many hundreds of years, to look at a Sienese polyptych and think: when this was painted, this was a new artistic form; what’s more, these now venerable-seeming saints were new too, their iconography up for grabs.
In the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena, there is a triptych painted by Simone Martini from around 1324 showing the Blessed Agostino Novello, a Sicilian-born hermit saint who’d died near Siena as recently as 1309. Agostino performed a number of thrilling posthumous miracles: he dived through the sky with incredible skill to soften the fall of a child from a collapsing balcony; swooped in from on high to revive an infant savaged by a dog; prevented a traveller in a lonely mountain pass from being crushed by his falling horse; most excitingly of all, resuced a baby whose hammock-like cradle had come free of its fastenings. Less than a generation separated the events from the painting. Agostino and his like were powerful new religious forces whose legacies could be promoted by painters.
Perhaps the most dramatic artwork of all, though, was Duccio’s Maestà. It was a huge and complex structure, and double-sided: the Virgin took the central spot at the front side, facing the congregation: angels rest their hands and heads on the back of her throne, gazing at her and the infant Christ protectively, as a wider cordon of saints mass around her in reverence. Above and below, pinnacles and a predella show scenes from her life. On the reverse side, visible to the clergy and, perhaps only on holy days, by the wider populace, the focus is Christ, culminating in his crucifixion. The predella tracks his life from his temptations, via the wedding feast at Cana, through to the resurrection of Lazarus.
The invention and the dazzle are wonderful: the Sienese insistence on the very best materials means the thing hums with energetic colour even now, and the whole work, with its narrative scenes, demands to be read and reread over months or years (it is the first surviving predella whose individual scenes link up to tell one larger story). It is a sobering reminder of the vagaries of taste, though, that in the 16th century this magnificent structure was demoted to a side chapel and in the 18th, sliced in half through its skinny middle, separating the two painted sides, then the whole thing chopped up into individual scenes with a view to selling them. Though most of the 33 parts are still in Siena, in the Museo dell’Opera, the rest are scattered widely – into 10 collections in five countries. The reuniting of the surviving parts of the back predella for the National Gallery exhibition represents the first time they have been seen together since they were broken up.
What cannot be seen in London, since it is a fresco that sits on the walls of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, and even now is closed for conservation work, is surely one of the most captivating artworks anywhere: Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government, which adorned the chamber in which the executive branch of the Sienese government held its meetings.
One of the chief delights of this complex, remarkable work is its vision of a well-governed city – a walled city remarkably like Siena that in turn protects a countryside that is productive, safe, populous and unthreatening, complete with an elegant lady on horseback, donkeys, dogs and a contented black-and-white striped pig. In this well-governed city the buildings are well-maintained, the streets bustle with trade, a cat skitters along a high balustrade outside a window, and, most touching of all, a house martin, heraldically black and white like Siena’s coat of arms, tends to the nest it has made under the eaves of a house.
In another part of the fresco, at right angles to the well-governed city, the Virtues sit – Prudence, Fortitude, Temperance and the rest, all personified into queenly women. The best of these is Peace, who reclines in her long white shift, head leaning on her hand, olive leaves crowning her head, her deep, richly embroidered cushion propped up by the armour she has taken off: a picture of repose and contemplation and somehow, despite all the philosophical density of the fresco, a real woman made of flesh and blood and thought and feeling.
