The Met’s Siena Exhibition: Lovely and Learned

Gothic Art meets the Renaissance via Duccio, Simone di Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers. 

S iena: the Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 is the Met’s new exhibition and a perfect, grounding Christmas experience. No Rudolph, no jingling bells, and no mistletoe here. Instead, Baby Jesus, Mary, and solid art history rule the galleries along with Siena, the Tuscan city whose art revolution around 1300 was so silken, so subtle that we need to study it to believe it. The art on view, in its day, was cutting-edge but infused with Gothic mystery, much as the best Christmases are about busy people, living in the present, gathering to reflect, reminisce, and hope for a miracle or two.

The Met, collaborating with the National Gallery in London, got superb loans displayed not to dazzle but to evoke and enchant. Even the iciest of heathens will be moved to believe. The exhibition’s a rich, complex one with sections on painting, ivory sculpture, textiles, enamels, and gold, with lots of obscure though juicy stories. While Florence’s palette is austere and given to gray and white marble, Siena’s is stippled gold, tactile and reflective, and luscious ultramarine, crimson, cinnabar, and coral. The show focuses on only five artists — Duccio, the bothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the sculptor Tino di Camaino, and Simone Martini — but each is a heavy hitter.

The Rise of Painting begins in an introductory gallery with Duccio di Buoninsegna (c.1255–c. 1319), Sienese painting’s founding father. He’s Giotto’s peer, but less known because so little of his work is still with us and Siena shriveled in comparison with Florence after defeat in war and the Black Death. Today, Siena is a pretty, boutique city known for its sublime Gothic duomo, its clamshell-shaped main piazza, and the Palio horse race. It’s also a place the Middle Ages never seems to have left.

The Met’s Duccio, Madonna and Child from the 1290s, is, at 11 by 8.25 inches, notoriously tiny, given that the museum paid $50 million for it in 2004. But Philippe de Montebello, the director then, had to have it and raised the money. Later in the exhibition, we see parts of Duccio’s Maestà, the massive altarpiece showing the Virgin supreme among a cast of hundreds.

The Met’s little Duccio is more than a teaser. Yes, with $50 million, the Met could have flown every school-aged child in, say, the Bronx to Siena to see Maestà, a super-duper. This rankled me to no end 20 years ago but, putting aside the baby’s weird, shrunken look, more a ventriloquist’s dummy than a real bambino, it’s got power. It would likely have been a devotional image and not part of an altarpiece, so it was intended to be held, contemplated, and adored. It’s displayed next to Enthroned Virgin and Child, a small ivory sculpture of Mary holding Jesus from between 1260 and 1280. It’s very French, made in Paris, elegant and refined but tender, too. She’s organic. She touches her baby as a mother would. Duccio’s Madonna and Child draws from it.

Part of The Rise of Painting concerns the dissemination of style to and from Siena, with French influence on Sienese art traveling on the road linking Rome to Paris, which ran through Siena. The art of Siena, we learn, was much fancied among French popes, whether they were in exile in Avignon or in Rome.

In the ivory sculpture, the Virgin is smiling. Duccio’s Virgin isn’t. Jesus tugs at her veil and seems to wipe a tear from her eye. She knows what the future holds. Near the Duccio is the Madonna del Carmine, a small devotional painting by an unknown artist from around 1260, found in a Carmelite church in Siena. It’s in the old, hieratic, flat, Byzantine style that Sienese artists, starting with Duccio, discarded for a livelier, more sensual, and more narrative art.

And a more real art, which doesn’t necessarily mean realistic. Simone Martini’s five paintings, one a Virgin and Child and the other four of single saints, are from the late 1320s. They’re 23 by 15 inches, so too big for a devotional image that we’d have all to ourselves to contemplate in our easy chair by candlelight, sipping on a Negroni. They were probably part of a portable altarpiece with detachable, mix-and-match parts — a clever idea. I always enjoyed teaching about Italian art that some called Primitives, from that time when painting was not quite stiffly medieval and otherworldly but lacked the football-squad bulk and animation of, say, Mantegna.

Martini’s allure starts with his gold backgrounds, a legacy of Byzantine art, which, to students, is art that the Renaissance overthrew. Gold backgrounds can be incised to make, for instance, a saint’s halo, but, overall, they flatten and abstract the figure. Drapery has folds that suggest a body’s form and mass, but they’re a mere suggestion.

Faces aren’t based on models. They’re more or less generic. We need iconography such as St. Peter’s beard and his symbolic Keys to the Church to know that it’s St. Peter. Figures have the same serious look with nary a wince of pain or flush of euphoria. They’re symbols.

The Rise of Painting is in darkened galleries with tall, fake pillars, so it feels like the inside of a church. Martini’s five saints are in a row, the Virgin and Child in the center since they’re always the stars. When teaching with art like this in a museum setting at Yale or the Clark, I’d sit students on the floor so they’re looking up, supplicant whether or not they realize it, and turn off the lights in the gallery so the only sources of light were from adjacent galleries or a filtered window. Slowly, as eyes adjusted, the gold gilding start to glow. Halos flicker. Big eyes penetrate and question. “Have you been good?” the saints seem to ask. “I’ve heard you might have been selfish” or “haughty” or “obnoxious” or “chanted ‘River to the sea,’” they say, with that sideways look packed with reproach.

Even then, college students knew next to nothing about Christian saints, but, still, all were stirred if not shaken. These pictures had the look of authority. From their perch in heaven, they could tell who was naughty and who was nice.

I’d never heard of Martini’s St. Ansanus, not even 20 and a vocal Christian when he was unsuccessfully boiled in oil during Emperor Diocletian’s purge. Greasy but uncooked, he fled to Siena and became a star performer in the conversion business, an early influencer, and he didn’t even need TikTok.

Near these five paintings, and once you’ve atoned, is a treat. It’s Pietro Lorenzetti’s Pieve Polyptych, from 1320, also called the Tarlati Altarpiece for the bishop in Arezzo who commissioned it. In 700 years, it’s never left the church for which it was painted, so it has to be one of the Met’s great borrowing coups. Martini’s five saints are deadpan and solemn, as are the prophets, saints, the Virgin, and Jesus in Lorenzetti’s multipart altarpiece, but the treat is their elegance and the artist’s elan as a designer. No drab frocks for them. Mary wears patterned designer duds. Are those foxtails in the lining of her cloak? The saints hold embossed books. In the Annunciation panel above the Virgin and Child, Mary’s space has red and blue rosettes painted on the wall. The Angel’s space boasts a foliage frieze. In the cusp, Mary’s Assumption is framed in a fiery mandorla. The saints pose, each differently, as though they’re set to be on the cover of Vanity Fair’s annual movie-star issue.

The thing’s stunningly beautiful and sumptuous. Is it too twee for prayer? It’s design-focused, certainly, with single arches, then double arches, pinnacles, and medallions, and a balance of warm and cool colors. God’s hand springs from a dark cloud, propelling the dove of the Holy Spirit through a window into Mary’s chamber, its attic decorated with lithe colonnettes. So many clever touches. Many things can promote prayer, and while courtliness and panache aren’t usually among them, I was game.

Duccio painted Maestà as the main altarpiece for Siena’s Duomo sometime between 1308 and 1311. At 16 feet wide and once the biggest painted altarpiece in Europe, it isn’t in the Met show in its entirety. It’s now in 33 pieces in five different collections in ten countries, with much of the front in the Duomo’s museum in Siena. What The Rise of Painting delivers, with entrepreneurial bravura, is Maestà’s scale, narrative complexity, and resplendence. The Met couldn’t or didn’t get an ideal roster of loans, but if we can’t go to Siena, and all its biggest art hits couldn’t come to New York, the Met conveys the spirit of Siena.

The Tarlati Altarpiece descends directly from Maestà, which is the name of altarpieces depicting Mary in majesty as the Queen of Heaven, though Duccio’s Maestà seems to have cornered the name for itself. Through a reproduction, the Met surmises the original’s look before it was chopped in pieces over centuries.

Maestà, unlike most other Italian Gothic altarpieces, few of which, by the by, survive, has a decorated front and back. The front is ritualistic and hierarchical. The Mass, a choreographed thing, would have reflected this. The main attraction — Mary, the baby Jesus, and rows of saints and angels — would have been visible from the Duomo’s peanut gallery, considering Mary’s mammoth size and a muster of golden halos. The predella — the step from the altar — and pinnacle scenes are narrative and depict the most familiar stories of Jesus’s early life and a survey of Mary’s life from the Annunciation to her funeral. Though small, they’re familiar enough and have enough bright red, blue, and orange to be scrutable from a distance. Viewers knew what they were but couldn’t see details.

The back panel, though, which tells the Passion story in 26 detailed scenes, was meant to be seen in close-up, not during Mass but by viewers on their own, moving idiosyncratically, looking at what attracted them. The Met unites, for the first time in 250 years, a group of the back’s predella paintings and other small front and back scenes. Displayed are The Temptation of Jesus on the Mountain, Jesus and the Samaritan Woman, The Raising of Lazarus, The Transfiguration and The Temptation of the Temple, and two or three others.

Duccio does devils with menacing dash. In one picture, Jesus and the Devil seem to debate on the balcony of what looks like a Romanesque baptistry. Set in the mountains in another, Old Scratch taunts Jesus among miniaturized Italian hill towns. In The Transfiguration, Jesus shimmers as apostles cower on a strange, open plain. An onlooker in The Raising of Lazarus holds his nose. “This dead guy stinks” is a prosaic moment.

Duccio’s storytelling prowess is clear even if the Met couldn’t pry more panels from the Duomo’s museum. These paintings are on wood panels, which most museums won’t lend because of their extreme susceptibility to changes in temperature and humidity. And these altarpieces tend to live rough lives. In 1777, Maestà was sawn in half, separating front and back. Most altarpieces were totally trashed as tastes changed. It’s a Christmas miracle that the Met got as many altarpiece parts, small and large, as it did for the entirety of The Rise of Painting.

A word about Florence, which gets the lion’s, tiger’s, and bear’s share of credit for the Italian Renaissance. Florence and Siena were once equals and rivals and then enemies on different sides of the popes’ eternal machinations and those of the French. Siena’s protectress — the Virgin herself — proved less of a Joan of Arc, less of an Annie Oakley, and Siena lost one battle too many before the Black Death killed half the city’s population in 1348, including the Lorenzetti brothers. For centuries, the little city was a banking center, but it always clung to its Gothic look and small scale. It fomented no Leonardo, no Titian, and no Michelangelo. Its calling card was — and is — a sublime charm.