In the grand arc of the history of Western painting, Siena is indisputably important, but one is not quite sure in what way. In the last quarter of the thirteenth century, Siena rivaled Florence as one of those watersheds that forever altered the course of our visual culture. If Florence could boast of Cimabue, Siena could claim Duccio. A little later, the Sienese master Simone Martini could stand his ground against Giotto himself. And yet, by the beginning of the fifteenth century, something odd began to happen. Siena continued to produce paintings of great skill and beauty—as is obvious in the works of Sano di Pietro and Giovanni di Paolo—but it ceased to innovate, as Florence would do throughout that period. As late as 1500, Neroccio de’ Landi was producing works that, to superficial inspection, did not differ markedly from what Sienese artists had produced nearly two centuries before.
Detail of Stories from the Life of Saint Nicholas by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (active 1319–1347), c. 1332–1334. Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence; photograph © Gabinetto Fotografico delle Gallerie degli Uffizi. All photographs courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
A new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350, examines this anomalous culture through more than one hundred paintings, as well as a few well-chosen sculptures and religious artifacts. Although the show draws heavily on works from the National Gallery in London, as well as in sundry American collections, in fact, the Metropolitan could, at least in theory, have based a substantial show of Sienese painting on only what is found on its own walls and in its own vaults. In addition to its extensive holdings, the museum houses the famed Lehman Wing (technically an independent institution), which has some of the finest and most copious holdings of Sienese art outside of Italy.
Virgin and Child with Four Saints and a Dominican Nun by Simone Martini (active by 1315–died 1344), c. 1325. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; photograph © Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.
One suspects that the reason that Florence pulled ahead had to do with the dominant role of humanism in that city and with its relative absence in Siena. Even in the early works of Cimabue and Giotto in Florence, one senses a tentative movement toward an anthropocentric view of the world, with life-sized figures weighed down by earth’s gravitational pull, and figures that, even when diminutive, inhabit space in a plausible way. In Siena, by contrast, everything is ultimately subordinated to an almost abstracted beauty. A cast of thousands in Simone Martini’s Christ Carrying the Cross and Pietro Lorenzetti’s Crucifixion is reduced to charming patterns of color and form. Similarly, in the magnificent panels depicting the life of Saint Nicholas by Pietro’s brother Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the primordial perspective is a little steeper and irreal than in the roughly contemporary works of Giotto, and a general gauze of fable, if not mythology, falls between the viewer and this bejeweled art.
Christ Carrying the Cross by Martini, c. 1335. Musée du Louvre, Paris; photograph © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Gérard Blot.
Despite the title of the present exhibition, the limits that the curators have imposed on themselves—that is, to examine only Sienese painting of the first half of the fourteenth century—cannot
possibly tell the whole story of the “rise of painting.” Oddly enough, this crucial question of the emergence of Old Master painting out of the medieval artisan tradition is one that has never really been asked and certainly has never been adequately answered, unlike in astrophysics where entire careers are founded on an attempt to explain the Big Bang. Everyone knows that Old Master painting emerged from the doings of Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto, but where did those masters themselves come from? I believe that the answer would take us back fully two hundred years before the span covered by the present exhibition.
The Annunciation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (active 1319–1347), 1344. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena; photograph © Foto Studio Lensini Siena.
As for Siena, the excellence of its painters could not save it from quickly becoming a cultural backwater. Certainly, some of Siena’s native sons, like Enea Silvio Piccolomini—later Pope Pius II—were great humanist scholars, but this fact had little to do with the city itself. Humanism compelled the painters of Florence to innovate constantly in the perfection of their art. One need only recall Brunelleschi’s invention of linear perspective, or Leon Batista Alberti’s treatises on painting and on architecture. But ultimately the present exhibition provokes a deeper question: does a culture need to change the course of art history in order for it to be important? May it not be that, by producing such works of rare beauty as are on view at the Met, Siena, over the two centuries of its greatness, had done quite enough?
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 • Metropolitan Museum of Art • to January 26, 2025 • metmuseum.org
