“Siena: The Rise of Painting” at the National Gallery, London. Exhibition review.

The Background

In the late 13^th century, the Tuscan city of Siena grew prosperous from trade, from banking, and from its position on the Via Francigena, one of the pilgrim routes to Rome. After it made political peace with its rival, Florence, it briefly blazed. 

Duccio: The first great artist

Duccio di Buoninsegna is the first Siena artist who seemed to begin to break away from the old traditions. He had a successful workshop and his fame spread beyond his native city. However, the great Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti noted that Duccio painted in “the Greek manner”. While sculpture had moved away from the old, clumsy forms, painting took longer to do so and in Duccio’s time, church altarpieces were static and hieratic, Byzantine in inspiration, designed to produce a feeling of awe in the face of sanctity. The Madonna is always impassive. She shows no personality; she looks out at us from her silver appliqué casing (in the case of an icon) or from her backdrop of gold leaf (in the case of an altarpiece), the careful embossing and tooling of the support designed to catch and refract the candlelight, making the image glimmer numinously. Arrayed alongside her are ranks of saints and angels, all equally other-worldly. Duccio’s earliest works are in this vein.

The Maestà: inauguration

In 1308, Duccio was commissioned to paint a high altarpiece for Siena cathedral. The result was his famous Maestà, his Madonna in Majesty, which took him three years to complete, and which, when finished, was paraded into town with rejoicing. As the Blue Guide notes: “As soon as it was finished, Siena declared a public holiday and processed it through the streets from Duccio’s studio round the Campo, accompanied by the Council of Nine, prelates, and the joyous inhabitants while all the church bells rang out and there was a trumpet fanfare.” 

The Maestà: dismemberment

In 1771, the Maestà was removed from the cathedral’s high altar, broken up and its panels dispersed. Today they adorn museums around the globe. Some have been lost altogether. In this exhibition, for the first time, scenes of life of Christ from the back of the predella (the base of the altarpiece) have been reassembled. And it is in these predella scenes that art in the early 14^th century begins to become personal and human and fun. These miniature panels, invisible from a distance, seen only if you approach very close, have less of the grandeur of the main saints in their niches. Instead they are intimate and personal, enjoying little details of the everyday. In the scene of the Washing of the Feet, for example, the focus is less on Christ, who is placed to one side, and more on the action of the disciples unlacing their sandals.

After Duccio

The artists who followed Duccio were Simone Martini (c. 1284–1344), and his near contemporary Pietro Lorenzetti. It is with these painters that faces begin to take on a more three-dimensional, sculptural quality. The saints are still apart from us, inhabiting a divine realm of gold and sumptuous fabrics, but they begin to show recognisable human facial expression.

What was once static begins to move. Simone Martini was a master of the crowd scene, as exemplified in the Road to Calvary scene from his Passion Polyptych (its panels now held in museums in Antwerp, Berlin and Paris). The faces and figures are imbued with a range of emotions: grief; suffering; cruelty; indifference.

The Human Dimension

It is in the work of Pietro’s younger brother Ambrogio Lorenztti, however, that the human interest really begins to come into its own. Instead of using icons to intimate a vision of heaven that is remote and austere, magnificient and incomprehensible, he brings those heavenly figures down to earth, to our own level. Our quest for ‘a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower’ is something that began in Tuscany in the 14^th century and is a mania we have never lost. Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s works are full of human interest, of charming little details and observations, and is these that make Sienese art so alive. Ambrogio’s St Nicholas is not portrayed as a static bishop, for instance; we see him making himself as tall as he can, standing on tiptoe, in order to reach a high window; the poor girls whose lives he saves by his generosity are shown in a bare room where the artist has enjoyed including the details of their threadbare mattress coming apart at the seams. Ambrogio was one of the pioneers of the cartoon-strip technique of showing a complete story in a series of different scenes on a single flat surface.

Finale

With Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers, Siena contributed enormously to the rise of painting. But only a few decades later, in 1348, it also witnessed its fall, when bubonic plague devastated the city. But painting as an art form was never to look back. Thanks to these early masters, art had firmly embarked on its pictorial path, away from what we cannot depict (God) and towards what we obsessively and endlessly can (ourselves).

This is a sumptuous and beautiful show, with material carefully and thoughtfully–and pioneeringly–brought together from all over the world. It confines itself to a handful of early artists. You will not come out disappointed. There is much to marvel at.

ABB

Siena: The Rise of Painting. On show at the National Gallery, London, until 22^nd June 2025