On 9 June 1311, the people of Siena witnessed the most extraordinary sight they had ever beheld. Word had got out that something miraculous had been created in the workshop of the painter Duccio di Buoninsegna on the Via Stalloreggi, a narrow, dipping street on the hill crowned by the Duomo, and crowds had gathered. When the doors opened what emerged was an unparalleled object – not so much a painting as a huge, golden construction embedded with countless jewel-like images; a thing so otherworldly and unexpected that it was simultaneously a work of art the like of which had never been seen before and a religious artefact imbued with divine powers.
An eyewitness recorded that the city came to a halt:
“… the shops were locked up and the Bishop ordered a great and devout company of priests and brothers with a solemn procession, accompanied by the Signori of the Nine [the governing council] and all the officials of the Commune, and all the populace and all the most worthy were in order next to the said panel with lights lit in their hands, and then behind were women and children with much devotion; and they accompanied it right to the Duomo making procession around the Campo, as was the custom, sounding all the bells in glory out of devotion for such a noble panel as was this.”
Meanwhile, the poor received alms, and prayers were offered to the Virgin, the city’s patron saint, for protection “from every misfortune, traitor or enemy”. The mother of Christ had been held in special veneration in Siena since 1260, when it fought the numerically superior force of its rival Florence at the Battle of Montaperti, ten miles from the city. The Sienese were Ghibellines, supporters of the Holy Roman emperor; the Florentines were Guelphs, supporters of the pope. The Virgin, legend had it, cast her mantle over the city and its troops and thanks to her intercession Siena prevailed. Indeed, only a year before the appearance of Duccio’s work, the Palio, Siena’s famous horse race, was first run as part of the celebrations around the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin.
And then there she was, almost real, fresh from Duccio’s hand, and arrayed in the richest lapis blue, slightly more than life-size against a sea of gold, an apparition that seemed to be alive as the cart that pulled her rolled around the city, within touching distance of the citizens.
At the end of its peregrination, the painting, known as the Maestà – majesty – was placed on the high altar of the cathedral. It was an object of wonder. The main scene, fully 13ft wide, showed the Virgin and Child enthroned, hemmed in by a tight press of ten saints, 20 angels and ten apostles. Surrounding this picture were nearly 40 other painted panels: above her was a series depicting episodes from her life and death; in the predella – a frieze of small narrative paintings – beneath, were scenes from the Nativity and early life of Christ. They were meant to be read as a bande dessinée.
Because the Maestà was free-standing, the reverse was just as overwhelming and covered with paintings too, nearly 50 panels showing acts of Christ’s teaching and his Passion. Both front and back were topped by an array of angels. The whole structure, five square metres of carving, gilding and painting, was as much a work of architecture as art, resembling the facade of a cathedral capped with sky-pricking finials and gothic pediments.
The wealth of Trecento Siena derived from banking and its situation on the Via Francigena, the north-south pilgrim route that funnelled the faithful towards Rome. As it passed through the city the way was lined by the shops of goldsmiths and cloth merchants. The Maestà, the largest painted altarpiece in Europe at the time, was therefore more than just a sign of Siena’s devotion to the Virgin; it was an emblem of pride in the republic too. For the artist himself, it also represented a form of spiritual credit. He signed the painting – a rare act at the time – on the Virgin’s footstool: “Holy Mother of God, be thou the cause of peace for Siena, and of life for Duccio because he painted thee thus.”
Alongside Giotto’s frescoes in the Upper Basilica at Assisi, the Maestà has traditionally been held as the starting point of early Renaissance art history. In it, Duccio made significant advances that broke from the hieratic nature of Byzantine art: there are narrative scenes, nuanced emotion, an array of settings – landscapes, urban views, interiors – greater three-dimensionality and informality, the integration of figures into believable space, and a profusion of incidental detail for the diversion of the lay rather than exclusively the clerical viewer. The paintings also related to another of his innovations: the pioneering of portable, multi-panel, devotional works. All these traits would become staples of Renaissance art but their origins in Siena were overwritten by Giorgio Vasari, who claimed that most paintings worthy of note stemmed instead from the Florentine tradition. In his brief note on Duccio, Vasari depicted him as someone whose achievements were perfected by others, although he did concede that he “very judiciously gave his figures a certain grace of outline”.
Duccio (c 1250/5-1319) himself was Sienese by birth and, with Giotto (c 1267-1337) and Cimabue (c 1240-1302), was part of the founding triumvirate of early Italian art. What little is known about him comes from documents relating to commissions, others listing unpaid debts, and more relating to his ornery behaviour – he was fined for obstructing a public street, for not presenting himself for military service, and for breaking a curfew. Nevertheless, he was so highly regarded that in 1285, as an outsider, he was commissioned to paint the Rucellai Madonna for Santa Maria Novella, the most important Dominican church in Florence.
Duccio is the central figure in the National Gallery’s extraordinary new exhibition, “Siena: the Rise of Painting, 1300-1350”, alongside his pupils Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and his acolyte Simone Martini. As the historian and priest Sigismondo Tizio put it somewhat purply: “Out of his workshop, as though from the Trojan horse, came forth excellent painters.” Indeed, this is an exhibition of connections: Siena was part of a cultural network that fanned out to Avignon, Bohemia and England, and its artists drew on influences as varied as Byzantine icons and French gothic ivories, Anatolian rugs and Iberian textiles, as well as the frescoes of Giotto in Assisi and by Pietro Cavallini in Rome. Examples of this rich material world are included among the pictures to show how, from this mixture, the Sienese expanded the idea of what painting could do.
What is dominant in the imagery is a new determination to engage with the biblical narrative by setting it in a recognisable rather than an abstract realm: the human and the numinous combined. These are still gold-ground paintings, the glittering backgrounds are an unequivocal statement about an omnipresent divinity, but the actors on the gilded stages are demonstrably human.
For example, Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple (1342) shows a scene to which any parent can relate. Christ had wandered off during a visit to the temple to debate with the divines gathered there, leaving his parents fraught at his disappearance. Simone paints the moment of his return as Joseph, a hand comfortingly but firmly on the boy’s shoulder, points to the frazzled Virgin to show the consequences of his thoughtlessness. Joseph’s gesture clearly says: “Look what you have done.” Mary’s upturned hand states: “Why did you go off without saying?” And Christ in response, arms defensively crossed on his chest, scowls in defiance. He may be the Son of God, but he no more relishes a scolding than any other stroppy pre-teen.
This same alertness to the emotional register is also apparent in assorted paintings of the Virgin and Child, a type ultimately derived from an apocryphal portrait of the Madonna painted by St Luke. In Duccio’s Stoclet Madonna (1290-1300), the Christ child – a small adult – reaches up to move the veil from his mother’s face to reveal an expression of sorrow as she is struck by intimations of her son’s future fate. In Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte (c 1325), Christ grips his mother’s breast as he feeds and looks out at the viewer as though he has been momentarily interrupted in his suckling. In Simone Martini’s The Virgin and Child (c 1325), both figures lock eyes with the spectator and Christ pulls his mother’s mantle – a gesture both of childlike exploration and of covering up, to keep the interaction with his mother private.
Meanwhile, Pietro Lorenzetti’s Birth of the Virgin (1335-42) shows how rapidly other pictorial and conceptual notions were advancing. The picture is set in a space divided into three, allowing for distinct scenes: St Anne – Mary’s mother – and her newborn in the middle, attendants at the birth to the right; Joachim being given the news of his child’s birth to the left. A midwife tests the temperature of the water in a bowl before they wash the child, helpers carry swaddling and sheeting, the nervous father sits with a friend for company. The spaces in which the action is set are given depth by receding tiles and an enfilade of corridors and courtyards. In this one image, Pietro explored simultaneous action, narrative detail, universal human instincts and rudimentary pictorial perspective. Here was a holy event made both familiar and contemporary.
In his fresco cycle Good and Bad Government (1338-9) in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena’s seat of power, Ambrogio Lorenzetti went even further, using proto-naturalistic city scenes and Tuscan landscapes in an allegory representing the benefits and characteristics of a state prospering under judicious government.
The highlight of the exhibition is the back predella of the Maestà, the first time the eight pictures have been brought together for the best part of 250 years (the bulk of the work remains in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo Siena). For all the fanfare of its unveiling, the altarpiece was seen as old fashioned by 1506, when it was replaced in the Duomo. Then, in 1777, it was sawn in half through the thickness of the panel – a slip of the blade sliced the Virgin’s face – and individual images sold off, a process that continued under the Napoleonic occupation and the Risorgimento. The work is now in 33 pieces, dispersed across ten collections in five countries; 16 images are missing. The survival of so many is evidence of both the Maestà’shistorical importance and the beauty of every component piece: each panel was worthy of care and attention in itself and would in time inspire full-size altarpieces. And the same choice quality is true of everything in the exhibition, whether paintings, sculptures, textiles or metalwork.
Duccio’s contemporary Dante used the phrase dolce stil nuovo – sweet new style – to characterise his expressive melding of human and divine love in his own poetry. This exhibition, both visually and spiritually sumptuous, shows how the painters of early-14th-century Siena forged a sweet new style too.
Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350
The National Gallery, London WC2. Until 22 June
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out