Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350
Through January 26
The Met Fifth Avenue
By Dennis Raverty
This exhibition of 14th-century art of Siena offers a concise survey of the elegant painting, sculpture, and craft produced by artists in this important cultural center, long overshadowed in the public mind by the work of their rivals, the Florentines. There is an opportunity to appreciate the less-familiar art of Florence’s onetime rival for dominance of central Italy during the late Gothic or “proto-Renaissance” period of the 1300s (the Trecento).
The art of Siena represents a moderate, graceful, and less realistic alternative to the naturalistic but sometimes inelegant and occasionally even somewhat awkward art of Giotto and his followers in nearby Florence and Padua, artistic developments of which the Sienese artists were aware and to which they were responding with their more moderate style.
Much of Siena’s fortune during the Trecento was tied to its strategic location on the road between Rome and Avignon in France, the seat of the papacy from 1309 through 1379. But when the papacy returned to Rome during the last decades of the century, Florence became firmly established as the dominant economic and artistic hub of the Italian peninsula and the Renaissance was born.
In Sienese painting, however, a delicate sense of grace or grazie derived from Greco-Italian and French Gothic art tempered the influence of the more earthbound painting of the proto-Renaissance Florentines regarding both the depiction of space and the weight or gravitas of the figures.
One of the major achievements of the exhibition is bringing together several panels from the huge multi-scene polyptych by Duccio di Buoninsegna, the Maesta, or Madonna Enthroned. The back of the work treated the life of Christ in smaller narrative scenes. But the composite piece has since been partially dismantled, and many of the panels are now in various collections.
All the surviving paintings from the predella on the back side of the Maesta have been brought together. They represent episodes from the early ministry of Jesus. When they are viewed collectively rather than individually, spatial representation in the panels is kept shallow in order to avoid the appearance of deep pockets of space that might otherwise disrupt the harmonious continuity of space as a unified ensemble, sacrificing a certain degree of naturalism in order to achieve greater overall visual harmony across panels. In two central scenes from the predella shown here, for example, the adjustment between adjacent panels has the effect of leveling the space almost as if it were executed in sculptural relief.
The first panel represents Jesus calling his first disciples, who are fishing in the Lake of Galilee. The “horizon” appears to be just a few yards behind the boat, with the gold acting as a scrim, almost as if it were a stage set. Christ is elongated, he casts no shadow, and his feet barely seem to touch the ground; he appears almost weightless — a being of pure grazie. The following scene immediately to its right is The Marriage Feast at Cana. Although set indoors, it represents a similarly shallow space, bringing it into greater harmony with its neighboring panel.
By contrast, in the Last Supper by Florentine artist Giotto di Bondone from his Arena Chapel (not in the exhibit), the illusion of three-dimensional space allows for the apostles seated with their backs to us to be rendered with great gravitas, but this illusion of space creates its own problems, most notably in the rendering of a slim column that interferes with the figure situated behind it.
Unlike Duccio’s flat circular halos, the halos in the Giotto seem to be three-dimensional disks that turn with the figures. This concretization of the halos into three-dimensional objects makes it seem almost that the apostles with their backs to us might be licking their plates, and even the possibility of this sort of reading makes it highly inappropriate for a narrative of such gravity.
All this clumsy naturalism is avoided in Duccio’s Marriage Feast, painted about five or six years later than the Giotto. Duccio utilizes multiple viewpoints to modulate the depth — we look down on the floor from above as if hovering in space, yet look up at the rafters in the ceiling from below. The table seems to recede somewhat, as if we are above it, yet the plates and cups are shown as if they were seen from the side, rather than resting comfortably on the surface of the table. The stewards in the foreground are depicted smaller than the seated figures behind them. All this tends to reduce the illusion of depth to a finite space not unlike the shallow space of Manet and Cezanne centuries later.
A similarly graceful softening of form is evident in the sculptural works included in the exhibition, such as Giovanni di Agostino’s Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine and John the Baptist. Here the lighter style is in reaction to the heaviness of Nicola Pisano’s reliefs for the pulpit of the Siena Cathedral, carved more than a generation earlier than the Agostino. The lyrical cascade of the Virgin’s garments, the sway of the figures and the pointed arches that frame the scene all embody a delicate French Gothic manner tempering the naturalism, with far more grazie than gravitas.
In the Trecento, the distinction between the fine arts (i.e., painting and sculpture) and the crafts that was established during the Renaissance was not yet recognized, and in keeping with this, the exhibition features some elegant works of craft, including gold crucifixes, elaborate reliquaries, and even some fragments of lavish brocade textiles that have somehow survived. A particularly exquisite chalice attributed to the workshop of Tondino di Guerrino contains tiny enamel scenes from the life of Christ and of Saint Francis in its base. The level of detail is astounding.
My favorite work in the exhibition is the painting Madonna del Latte by Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Here the play between two- and three-dimensional illusion is quite subtle. The red and blue of Mary’s garments are rendered flat and unmodulated, while the pink cloth that cradles Christ is shown with a full range of lights and darks in a convincing evocation of the weight and substance of the fabric.
The corporality of the infant is evident in the grasping right hand of his mother, but the legs of Jesus pivot like a pinwheel without occupying space. The frame within the frame teases us with unfolding levels of reality and illusion, with the gold-embossed halos overlapping the “frame.” The flesh is painted with a very robust and quite painterly dry brush technique that is easily missed in reproduction, but can be seen in the original (especially in the detail of Christ’s face illustrated, where the green underpainting is visible beneath layers of translucent tempera).
Mary looks down at Christ with a gentle warmth but with perhaps a touch of sadness. Jesus in the flesh regards us with curiosity, looking directly at us: unafraid, alert, clearly an infant yet wise beyond his age. By implication, the Virgin Mother of God, patron saint of Siena, nurses us as well with the milk of her abundant grazie.
Dr. Dennis Raverty is a retired associate professor of art history, specializing in art of the 19th and 20th centuries, and gives frequent presentations, both live and online.