SIENA: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 at the National Gallery
SIENA: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 at the National Gallery. Starts the 8th March through to 22nd June, 2025.
There’s an assumption that you can date the start of the Renaissance with the invention of oil pigment, which allowed the likes of Mantegna, Caravaggio and Leonardo to paint with more precision, more colour and starker shadow.
However, in a small, prosperous hilltop city in Tuscany, among the 17 contrade, or neighbourhoods, the revolution had already started a couple of generations earlier. As well as the twice-yearly horse race, the Palio, for which they each had their riders, their liveries and their banners, the contrade also competed with each other in glorifying the Virgin Mary, commissioning works of art for their places of worship. This exhibition homes in on the extraordinary painting and sculpture that emerged in the first half of the 14th century, 150 years and more before the maestri of distant Flanders and nearby Florence changed the course of art history.
It concentrates on the four artists that not only developed the inventions of the earlier Florentine Giotto (1267-1337), building on Byzantine iconography idealised by Cimabue (1240-1302), but spread their message through Italy and then Europe. They are Duccio and his probable students, the Lorenzetti brothers and Simone Martini.
The story here begins with Duccio di Buoninsegna ‘Duccio’ who began as a jobbing decorator of ledger covers but had a flamboyance, imagination and anarchic outlook that made him stand forward. He talked his way into commissions, and his majestic double-sided altarpiece Maestà of 1308, with its multiple images, is his masterpiece. The first altarpiece to be painted both front and back, it is peopled with characters we could know, real people rather than stereoform sculpted forms. We have discovered narrative art.
He and others in Siena at this time used inscribed gilding to bring life to the images, an almost cinematic quality. In his Triptych with the Virgin and Child, St Dominic, St Aurea, Patriarchs and Prophets, commissioned a couple of years later by the Cardinal Bishop of Ostia, Christ is not the usual immobile icon gazing blindly past the viewer, but a real child, happily toying with his mother’s dignity by playing with her veil.
There is plenty of sculpture in the show, but one particularly poignant piece that speaks of the spirit of that small eon is almost completely absent. This is a life-sized wooden crucifixion by Lando di Pietro (c.1280-1340), created in 1338, which was almost completely destroyed by bombing in 1944. Its remains, two sides of the head only, tell of an exquisite piece of painted carving which shouts of humanist figurative sculpture decades in the future.
And despite the prolific church painting Duccio was commissioned to do, he also undertook private contracted work from patrons, foreshadowing the lucrative practices of the 16th and 17th centuries.
The brothers Pietro (c.1280-1348) and Ambrogio (c.1290-1348) Lorenzetti seem ubiquitous in Siena’s churches and many beyond, and with his multi-image Pieve Polyptych for the Church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo in 1320, Pietro sets out to outdo Duccio with expressive colour and precise line. So pleased with his work was Pietro that he signed it twice, at a time when artists never had the temerity to sign their art.
Ambrogio was reckoned to be the better painter of the brothers, both thought to have died in the Black Death of 1348, who may have started his career in more august circumstances than his older brother, by working on Duccio’s Maestà in the studio beside the cathedral for which it was destined. He became a leading exponent of the new idea of narrative in painting. He made Madonna del Latte in about 1325, on the verge of the height of his powers, in which we have the unusual scene of the Virgin breast-feeding her child; Jesus glances round at the viewer, resentful at having his meal disturbed, while we can almost hear Mary soothing him with a cooing voice.
In another departure from the norm, Ambrogio has etched the words of the Annunciation into the gold of Mary’s halo, and this interplay of words and image was to become a characteristic of his work. His narrative painting is reminiscent of modern Japanese anime, and in a single frame of a pair of panels from about 1332-34, St Nicholas and the Grain Ships; St Nicholas Resuscitates a Boy Strangled by the Devil, he tells the entire story of a gruesome murder of a boy in a dark alley, to the body’s removal indoors to a bed, to the intercession of the saint, to the raising of the child.
Simone Martini (c.1284-1344) picked up Duccio’s banner after the latter’s death in 1319, and his invaluable civic commissions too. Still working in the comparatively inflexible egg tempera long before Jan van Eyck (1390-1441) mixed his first oil colours, Martini was nevertheless able to bring a vibrancy and dash out of the medium through his technical virtuosity, as in his use of drapery in his Piazza Pubblico (town hall) altarpiece. It defies convention with its five panels of the saints Andrew, Peter, Ansanus and Luke flanking the Madonna and Child, all the same size, not gabled in the traditional way, so that he fused tradition and innovation to create his own style.
Martini was one of the first Sienese artists to capitalise on the split in the Church, with the schismatic popes being based in Avignon between 1309 and 1362, and in need of sacred art to decorate their churches and apartments, where the artists settled to benefit from handsome commissions. He lived there for the last decade of his life and is thought to have established a large studio, with other Sienese artists such as Lippo and Tederigo Memmi. His techniques began to be emulated and echoed across Europe.
The National Gallery’s latest exhibition on Siena explores how the city’s artists shaped the early Renaissance, influencing painters across Europe. For more details on the exhibition, visit the National Gallery’s official page.
For more insights into London’s art scene, exhibitions, and cultural events, visit EyeOnLondon. We’d love to hear your thoughts on Siena’s influence on the Renaissance—have your say in the comments below!
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