SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIÆVAL STYLE
On the Romantic instability of Siena—Fidelity to Byzantine
Ideals—Guido, Coppo, the Master of the Altar-front of St.
Peter—Duccio and his great Majesty of the Madonna—His twofold
tendency: to elaborated staged narrative; to sparse and exquisite
decoration—Simone Martini and the Idealistic chivalric style—The
Brothers Lorenzetti and the popular panoramic style—Second half of
the Fourteenth Century—The Fifteenth Century: Sassetta and
Giovanni de Paolo—Matteo, Benvenuto and Neroccio—The Renaissance
and the downfall of the School, Francesco di Giorgio, Sodoma.
As you enter Siena by the wide Camollia gate you will read in Latin
“Siena opens her Heart still wider to thee”:—_Cor magis tibi Sena
pandit._ Thus Siena avows herself the city of the heart. Where Florence
studied and calculated, she mused and dreamed; where Florence was solid,
she was volatile. For unrewarding idealisms she had a kind of genius.
Long after the other Italian communes had seen it was worst possible
business to support the emperor, Siena was faithful to that lost cause.
Every few years she changed her form of government, and seldom for the
better. Merrymaking and pageantry were universal in old Italy, but Siena
alone had a Spendthrift Club (_Brigata Spendereccia_) devoted to
continual pleasure, and a poet, Folgore da San Gemignano, to celebrate
its gaieties. Siena was ardent in inconstant fashion. Early in the 14th
century was found a nude marble Venus so beautiful that it was set up in
the great square and thronged with admirers. Then the war with Florence
went badly, and at a few words from a pious fanatic, the citizenry
smashed up the image and secretly buried the bits on Florentine soil to
bring bad luck to the foe. Naturally no bad luck ensued to Florence, but
Siena had enjoyed two delightful emotional crises. You will see why
Siena never could produce a realistic art, any more than Ireland has
produced one. Her eye was not on the object but on her own state of
mind. Thus Florence will produce historians, scientists, and
politicians, while Siena will produce saints and miracles.
Amid this romantic inconstancy, the continuing thread was the cult of
the Blessed Virgin. No other city thought so delicately of her, and no
other art has represented her so ideally. Had she not saved the city? In
1259 the Florentine Guelfs and their allies marched with overwhelming
force to the very gates of Siena. Ruin was imminent and despair abroad,
when by a common impulse the populace marched penitently to the
Cathedral and before the rude picture of the Queen of Heaven solemnly
committed the city into her hands. In ecstacy of renewed faith the
inferior army of Siena fell upon the invaders at Montaperti and utterly
routed them. In gratitude Siena remained the city of the Virgin. When in
1310 the painter Duccio replaced the rude effigy of the Madonna of
Victory with one of the finest Madonnas known to art, Fig. 37, the whole
city suspended business and escorted the picture from the studio to the
Cathedral with hymns and litanies in honor of their divine patroness.
Nowhere else has painting paid such homage to the Virgin Mary. In other
cities it was enough to represent her enthroned with a handful of angels
or saints in attendance. The Sienese painters multiplied the celestial
escort until it became a heavenly court over which the Mother of God
presides in sweet majesty. Siena also grasped at the then not quite
orthodox subject of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven. You see
her slender form rising amid a glory of angels more than a hundred years
before the theme was common elsewhere.
These brief hints will tell of the temper of Siena. You will not expect
such a city to be like Florence, interested in facts and charmed by the
human spectacle. She will be rather engrossed with the beauty of old
legends and in rare forward-looking moments concerned with her own
devout imaginings. She will not wish the saints to be like the people
one knows, but like denizens of some divine, far-off fairyland. Her
painting will not be humanistic but of an unworldly idealism.
[Illustration:
FIG. 34. Guido of Siena. Madonna.—_Uffizi._
]
Such being the temper of Siena, her artists, unlike those of Florence,
had no quarrel with the Byzantine style. Its splendid irreality only
needed to be made flexible and gracious. Siena has really no new ideas
to express, merely feelings more tender and exquisite. Her pictorial
reforms are reverent and gradual, backward-looking, mediæval. Her art
from 1300 to 1500, as lovely within its narrow limits as the closed
garden of the Virgin, has the great interest of teaching us what
capacities for growth lay in the mediæval tradition itself—what painting
in Italy would have been had Siena exercised her temporary might after
Montaperti and razed Florence five years before Giotto was born.
[Illustration:
FIG. 35. Sienese about 1275. Altar-front of St. Peter.—_Siena._
]
A little earlier than the year 1225, when Florence called in strangers
to adorn the Baptistery with mosaics in the Greek style, Guido of Siena
signed and dated 1221 the most famous of his madonnas. Unhappily the
enthroned Virgin of the Palazzo Pubblico was repainted some fifty years
later, a fact which has led many critics unnecessarily to doubt the
date.[15] But from half a dozen other pictures by Guido we may learn
that he was a diligent and rather heavy-handed imitator of the current
Greek formulas, Figure 34. At the battle of Montaperti the Sienese
captured an excellent Florentine painter, Coppo di Marcovaldo, and in
1261 he painted the admirable madonna which is still in the church of
the Servi. It shows a sensitive use of the Byzantine conventions. There
is pensiveness and almost shyness in the face and posture of the Virgin,
and loving intentness in that of the Child. Their relation is to each
other and not as in earlier madonnas to the devout public. These
intimate qualities have been ascribed, I think wrongly, to restoration.
But they appear even more emphatically in the entirely unrestored
Madonna, Figure 3, in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn, which I think may
be a Coppo[16], and is in any case of similar date and feeling.
The same process of sweetening the old style while accepting it, is
shown in the famous altar-piece of St. Peter in the Academy at Siena,
Figure 35. The gaunt figure of the Saint is completely traditional, the
little stories of the Annunciation and Nativity at the side show a new
vivacity and a new grace. Siena met the innovating painter more than
half way, for the indignant citizens soon marred with their knives the
crucifiers of the head of the Christian Church. The date of the panel
will not be far from 1275, and already the painter of genius who was to
create the sweet, new style was learning his trade.
[Illustration:
FIG. 36. Duccio Purcellai Madonna.—_Santa Maria Novella, Florence._
]
Of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the father of the Sienese school, and
everything considered its greatest master, we have numerous records,[17]
and by no means all to his credit. He must have had the artistic
temperament in a degree then unusual. The court records show half a
dozen fines against him, and he was not scrupulous about paying his
debts. One forgets these foibles before those Madonnas which are a
consummate expression of taste and those narratives which are a triumph
of tact and ingenuity. Duccio’s mind does not grasp the harsher and more
heroic emotions, but within the realm of the tender and pathetic he is
supreme. His elegance appears in his first important work, the famous
Rucellai Madonna, Figure 36, in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, which
tradition erroneously ascribes to Cimabue. It is presumably the great
panel which Duccio contracted to paint in 1285.[18] He was probably
young and unconsidered, for he took all the risks, agreeing that the
picture might be rejected at the will of the patrons. The Society of
Saint Mary the Virgin would have been foolish indeed to reject the most
gracious Madonna the world had then seen. Characteristic of Duccio are
the swaying curves of the contours and especially of the draperies, the
thin, delicately folded robes of the Child and the attendant angels and
the sensitively drawn bare feet. Working in Florence and doubtless
impressed by Cimabue, Duccio has retained in this early work a certain
austerity which gives way in his later work to a more feminine
sweetness. For that very reason the Rucellai Madonna is perhaps the
greatest Madonna of the century, since without loss of the stately
Byzantine qualities, she gains the new attributes of grace. It was no
wonder that when the name of Duccio had faded out of the Florentine
memory, Florence ascribed this noble Madonna to the venerated founder of
her native school, Cimabue. Recent criticism has righted the unconscious
wrong thus done to Siena.
[Illustration:
FIG. 37. Duccio. Madonna in Majesty.—_Opera del Duomo, Siena._
]
To mature his style Duccio needed only to intensify the qualities of
sweetness and grace which are evident already in the Rucellai Madonna.
The stages of his growth are represented in minor works at Siena and in
British and Roman collections. But his fame, for the layman, is
associated with the magnificent altar-piece which he executed for the
Cathedral of Siena, and only the special student need look beyond it. On
the 9th of October, 1309, Duccio contracted with the trustees of the
Cathedral to do a great altar-piece wholly with his own hands, at the
rate of sixteen soldi a day and expenses. He promised to take no other
work during the painting. It was finished in June of 1311 and carried in
solemn procession from the bottega outside the Porta a Stalloreggi to
the Cathedral. A chronicler describes the cortege “parading about the
Campo, as is usual, all the bells pealing a glory in devotion for so
noble a picture as this is.... And all that day they kept praying with
many alms which were given to poor folk, praying to God and His Mother,
who is our advocate, that she defend us in her infinite mercy from every
adversity and every ill, and save us from the hands of traitors and foes
of Siena.” Most characteristic of the febrile patriotism of Siena is
this constant dread of the traitor.
About a year before this ceremony the trustees enlarged the scheme for
the picture, making an additional contract for thirty-eight stories to
be paid at the rate of two florins and a half each. These were put on
the back of the altar-piece, covering very fully the life of Christ and
that of the Virgin. Thus the front of the altar-piece represents the
decorative and monumental ideals of Sienese painting while the back
exemplifies its feeling for narrative. Everything that Sienese painting
was to be is already in germ in this marvellous work.
In depicting the Virgin “in Majesty,” Figure 37, Duccio has magnified
the theme. Earlier pictures show only a handful of angels in attendance.
Here we have a cloud of celestial witnesses, the four patrons of Siena
kneeling in the foreground, at the sides charming alternation of grim,
bearded evangelists, orientally soft girl martyrs, and youthful
archangels. Seven years earlier Cimabue had conceived a similar great
Majesty for the Church of Santa Chiara at Pisa.[19] Doubtless Duccio had
seen it, and, though it is lost to us, we may assume, that the Sienese
artist outdid his prototype both in sweetness and splendor.
In many ways Duccio’s Majesty is highly traditional. It shows the
Byzantine horror of voids, is a little crowded. But this defect would be
less apparent if it were raised on its historiated base (_predella_)
with its original pinnacles above. Everything derives from Byzantine
exemplars, reverently improved in a realistic direction. Duccio has
dared to paint the Christ as a laddie; and not as a little old man; he
has shown the soft forms of His body through light draperies; he has
kept the austerity of the Byzantine apostles but has attenuated their
harshness; he has worked the insipid female masks of the older art into
forms of a positive and dreamy grace. One feels the tender mood of the
work in the Latin jingle at the foot of the throne, typical of dozens of
similar dedications in Siena:
Mater Sancta Dei
Sis caussa Senis requei
Sis Duccio vita
Te quia pinxit ita
which I may rudely paraphrase:
Holy Mother of God: grant Siena rest,
Grant life to Duccio,—he did his best.
All the sensibility of the City of the Virgin is in these prattling
rhymes with which they loved to hallow and offer great pictures.
[Illustration:
FIG. 38. Duccio. Entry into Jerusalem; Christ Washing the Apostles’
Feet; Last Supper. From the back of the great Madonna.—_Opera del
Duomo, Siena._
]
If the front of this panel shows only moderate innovations, the case is
not so for the back. The two score stories from the Bible or early
Christian legend, in the distribution of the figures follow faithfully
the standard Italo-Byzantine compositions. Where Duccio steps in is in
bettering the forms, giving grace to the draperies, and animation to the
gestures—above all in providing contemporary architectural accessories,
and coping with the problem of space. He also carries to their ultimate
refinement certain decorative formulas which the Byzantine painters had
glimpsed but not fully realized. Thus two quite opposed tendencies pass
into Sienese painting from Duccio;—a rather small preoccupation with
accessories and the problem of space, and a pure æstheticism concerned
with finesses of decorative arrangement—in short, the prose and the
poetry of Sienese painting.
Sienese narrative painting tends to be scrupulous about details and
inscenation, quite as a good story-teller naturally provides incidents
that make for plausibility. We may see how Duccio’s mind works in the
familiar theme of Christ entering Jerusalem, Figure 38. Duccio sets the
spectator in a garden with an open gate, thus throwing the scene back a
little. Above the procession and the rejoicing throng rises a city wall,
and still higher against the sky bristle Gothic towers and spires. Thus
the theme gains picturesqueness and variety. One forgets that there is
hardly space for the welcoming throng before the gate, and that the
donkey’s four feet are on a level although he is going up hill. These
little maladjustments show that while Duccio took infinite pains in
inventing the setting, he borrowed the figure groups bodily from earlier
Byzantine compositions in which the setting was simpler. In this
piecing-together process he turns some pretty sharp corners, but he
never sacrifices clarity and expressiveness.
In the scene where the maid servant catches the Galilean burr in Peter’s
voice, Figure 39, and asks if he be not a follower of Jesus, we find
Duccio’s method quite at its best. Nothing could be better than the
sudden turn of the girl with one foot on the steps. Fine, too, is the
concentration of the crowd on the exciting problem of gossip.
Well-observed, their actions as they warm their feet and hands at the
fire. Vivid, too, the impulsive gesture of Peter as he denies the
charge. The place, a court yard with a staircase leading right into the
picture above, which represents the court room where Jesus is being
questioned, is most elaborately planned. One looks back through a portal
into farther spaces. All this was so new and interesting that I presume
the Sienese have never noticed to this day that the seated group would
never fit in the space assigned to it and that the positions of the
figures are ambiguous. The picture does admirably its work of telling a
story spiritedly, and that is enough.
[Illustration:
FIG. 39. Duccio. Peter denies Christ.—_Opera del Duomo, Siena._
]
Duccio’s Calvary, Figure 41, is remarkable for breadth, spectacular
effectiveness, and a measured pathos. As usual he multiplies actors and
incidents while keeping the orderliness of the arrangement. The
slightness of all the forms, their little weight and uncertain balance
are apparent. And there is, on the same principle of taste, a similar
attenuation of emotion. Where Giotto at Padua gave stark tragedy, Duccio
offers a gentle flutter of restrained grief.
[Illustration:
FIG. 40. Duccio. The Marys at the Tomb.—_Opera del Duomo._
]
Such is the average of these narratives, clear, picturesque,
circumstantial, infused with a generalized and never very intense
emotion. There are some, mostly composed with few figures, which reveal
a great fastidiousness of arrangement. In such a composition as the
Marys at the Tomb, Figure 40, Duccio reveals himself as pure æsthete, as
consummate master of linear composition. The motive is essentially
insignificant, merely that the Marys shrunk at the sight of the angel at
the tomb, but out of that motive of withdrawal is wrought through the
little panel a lovely rhythm to which everything contributes—the rise of
the cliffs and their crinkly edges, the contrasting angles of the tomb
and its impossibly tilted lid, the reciprocal curve of the angel. We
grasp in the picture a general truth which reaches far beyond Duccio and
Siena, that a too conscious struggle for style precludes any complete
expression of emotional significance. For this picture is as trivial as
a narrative as it is exquisite as a decoration.
[Illustration:
FIG. 41. Duccio. Calvary.—_Opera del Duomo._
]
Duccio, who disappears from our sight about the year 1318, fixed once
for all the character of the Sienese school. In narrative it was to
adopt the placid and tender tone of legend, most unlike the urgent and
dramatic mood of Giotto. The Sienese artist was too reverent to raise
the question how did this happen, and how did the persons feel; he asked
rather “How do we feel about it as believers?” The beauty of the work,
then, is not that of outer reality but of revery and meditation. It
never has the tang and variety of good Florentine narrative painting,
but within its lovingly modulated monotony, Sienese narrative painting
is supremely charming.
[Illustration:
FIG. 42. Simone Martini. Madonna in Majesty. Fresco.—_Palazzo
Pubblico, Siena._
]
Duccio also started in Siena a somewhat worried and petty concern with
accessories, architecture, complications of perspective. He inaugurated
a tradition of material splendor in gilding, tooling, delicate
graduation of color which remained the glory of Sienese painting for
nearly two centuries. So far as we know he painted only in tempera on
panel, and the Sienese generally were to triumph in this feminine form
of work rather than in the masculine methods of fresco. Finally Duccio
took over from Byzantine art and perfected certain finesses of highly
simplified and abstract composition, a pure æstheticism distinctly
Sienese and wholly alien to the warm humanism of Florence. You will find
this austerely lovely style at its best in Simone Martini, and surviving
as late as Sassetta and the middle of the fifteenth century.
After Duccio, Sienese painting divides itself into two tendencies, one
aristocratic, chivalric and æsthetic, deriving from his decorative
manner; the other popular, narrative and realistic, deriving from his
minutely staged scenes on the back of the great altar-piece. Of the
aristocratic style Simone Martini is the greatest exemplar, of the
popular style, the brothers Lorenzetti.
Simone Martini was born in 1283 or thereabouts. We first meet him as an
artist in the great frescoed Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 42, completed
in 1315 for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. The arrangement is like that of
Duccio’s Majesty, finished only five years earlier, and the facial types
are generally those of Duccio. But the great fresco gains clarity and
impressiveness from the added space, from the picturesque motive of a
canopy, from the isolation and elevation of the Madonna above her
escort, and from the rich Gothic forms of the throne, which are a
novelty in painting. While most of the faces show the orientalism of
Duccio, the Madonna has the level-browed, intent character of Gothic
art, and the Child is realistic. Gothic again is the graceful border
with its fine medallions, and the bright colors of the whole. It is the
most splendid enthroned Virgin in the world, and she is conceived
chivalrically as a sort of tournament queen with her paladins upholding
a canopy, and angel pages on their knees offering roses and lilies.
To the Sienese this was a political picture, as a rhymed inscription in
Italian shows. The saintly patrons of Siena address the Virgin:
“Angelic flowers, roses and lilies
With which the heavenly meadow is adorned,
Delight me less than do good counsels.
But sometimes I see such as verily
Despise me and my city betray,
And gain praise the more for evil words,
With such as merit condemnation.”
The Virgin answers the saints patrons somewhat evasively:
“Fix my delights in your minds,
So that I shall, as ye wish,
Fulfil your honorable requests.
But if the powerful molest the weak,
Oppressing whether with shame or harm—
Let not your prayers be made for these
Nor for whomsoever betrays my city.”
[Illustration:
FIG. 43. Simone Martini. St. Martin Knighted.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
]
In Simone’s work this great Majesty is an exception. He preferred
generally to work on a more restricted scale, to burn the lamp of
æsthetic sacrifice. I can merely allude to the great idealized portrait
of St. Louis of Toulouse, in S. Lorenzo, Naples. It was painted for King
Robert of Anjou, whose kneeling figure appears in the picture, sometime
after 1317. The thing is resplendent in gold and azure, adorned by
curiously twisted Gothic borders; in sentiment it is impassive as a
Buddhist painting.
[Illustration:
FIG. 44. Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi. The Annunciation.—_Uffizi._
]
About the year 1325,[20] we may surmise, Simone was called to Assisi to
fresco the Chapel of St. Martin in the Lower Church. He set upon the
walls so many fairy tales, tender and sprightly in sentiment, provided
with the few essential accessories that a rapid story-teller would need.
What more charming than the boy Martin praying while they bind on him
the equipment of a knight, Figure 43, and musicians sound a fanfare!
What more gallant than the lad setting out on crusade against the
Teutons who lurk in a cleft of the background! This gracious childlike
quality, quite akin to the tender phase of Duccio, is exceptional in
Simone, who habitually is the strenuous decorator.
His sparse and austere methods appear clearly in the commemorative
fresco of Guidoriccio, hired general of Siena, and conqueror of
Sassoforte. It is in the Palazzo Pubblico and duly dated 1328. Nothing
is realistic but the horse and rider. They are isolated, hold alone a
field made up of pure symbols for camps, and fortresses and craggy
hill-tops, yet the martial effect is unmistakable and the composition
most quaintly impressive.
The quintessence of Simone’s later art is in the famous Annunciation of
the Uffizi, Figure 44. In order to justify the most nervously exquisite
of linear arrangements he has chosen the least significant moment of the
event. His Virgin is merely a sullen princess resenting an intrusion;
the Gabriel, an etherialized courtier pleading a cause with apologies.
But the contrast of the advancing and shrinking motives gave Simone
precisely what he wanted. He builds up areas richly colored or brocaded,
bounded by sharp curves, relieved by flutters and spirals of flying
drapery, and accentuated by such details as the olive twigs and the lily
which have the crisp incisiveness of finest metal work. As a triumph of
pure decoration Gothic painting has nothing better to show than this
lovely panel which was finished in 1333 for the chapel of Sant’ Ansano
at Siena. It has little quality of heart in it, and no reverence save
that of consummate workmanship.
Great honors awaited Simone. He was called to the exiled papal court at
Avignon in 1339, met Petrarch, painted Petrarch’s Laura and is lauded in
one of the poet’s sonnets. Of Simone’s work at Avignon we have only a
few small panels scattered between Antwerp, Paris, Liverpool, and
Berlin. The compositions, most of which belonged to a composite
altar-piece depicting Christ’s passion, waver between his old simple
style and a crowded and animated mood reminiscent of Duccio, and
influenced by the Lorenzetti. Simone is unable to resist the universal
tendency towards diffuse narrative, and in so far as he yields to it, he
is less than himself. Christ Bearing His Cross, in the Louvre,
exemplifies the extravagance and morbidness of this latest manner,
Figure 45. His strength lies in sacrifice and abstraction, his real
affinities are the contemporary Buddhist painters of China and Japan,
though of course he knew nothing of them. He died in 1344, leaving
behind him a tradition of fastidious artistry which was potent in Siena
for over a century.
[Illustration:
FIG. 45. Simone Martini. Christ bearing His Cross.—_Louvre._
]
As late as 1450, Lorenzo Ghiberti informs us in his “Commentaries,”[21]
the Sienese regarded Simone Martini as their greatest painter. He
differed from them, preferring, himself, Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This was
an eminently Florentine choice, Ambrogio’s warmth, concreteness, and
elaboration were on the whole Florentine. He worked for several years at
Florence, must have known Giotto, certainly studied him with discerning
admiration. With his elder brother, Pietro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti gave to
Duccio’s tradition of detailed narrative painting its perfected form.
They were great fresco painters, and most characteristic as such. In
panel painting they are less original, but they bring into this highly
conventional art a great ardor and curiosity. They represent the popular
average of Siena as Simone Martini represented its aristocratic
minority.
[Illustration:
FIG. 46. Pietro Lorenzetti. Madonna with Saints, 1320.—_Pieve,
Arezzo._
]
We first meet Pietro Lorenzetti as an artist in the altar-back at the
Pieve, Arezzo,[22] Figure 46, which was finished in 1320. It is an
_ancona_, or compartmented piece and the most splendid that has come
down in Romanesque form. The figures are of two sorts. The Madonna is of
intent Gothic type, and the fine motive of holding off the Christchild
at elbow length in order to see him better is borrowed from Giovanni
Pisano, who in turn took it from French Gothic sculpture. So are the
forms above in the Annunciation new and graceful, while the little boxed
room with its plastic column is also novel. The Assumption of the
Madonna in the highest pinnacle is probably the earliest occurrence of
this famous Sienese theme in painting. But all the figures of saints in
the three orders of the side panels are taken almost without change from
Duccio’s great altar-piece. It would be interesting to trace Pietro’s
emancipation through a dozen panels. No one better combined dignity with
grace, and feeling, and splendor. His work in fresco is fragmentary and
confused with that of his younger brother. We are certain of nothing
except a fragment of a deeply felt Calvary in the Church of St.
Francesco, at Siena. Many critics ascribe to him the agitated and wildly
picturesque frescoes of the Passion in the left transept of the Lower
Church at Assisi.[23] But this, I think, is a mistake. Pietro is never
in his certain works so lively and indecorous and casual. We have to do
with an artist influenced by Duccio working about 1330, Pietro himself
may appear as the Stigmatization, Figure 47, and one or two of the other
simpler compositions. The other frescoes are chiefly interesting as
showing the dangers of the panoramic method of Siena. Take the Last
Supper, Figure 48. The theme is simply lost in the fantastic richness of
the accessories. It is hard to find Christ or Judas, for the eye seeks
the radiating rafters or the scullery where cats lurk and eager
scullions wipe the dishes.
[Illustration:
FIG. 47. Pietro Lorenzetti, or Follower. St. Francis receiving the
Stigmata. Fresco.—_Lower Church, Assisi._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 48. School of Pietro Lorenzetti. The Last Supper. Fresco.—_Lower
Church, Assisi._
]
In the Birth of the Virgin, dated 1342, Figure 49, Pietro spoils a
carefully studied and well-felt picture by elaboration of the setting.
The frame is conceived as the plastic front of a Gothic room within and
behind which, spaces are multiplied confusingly. Here the pedantic
preoccupation with the problem of space offends the eye and destroys the
unity of what in a simpler setting would be a monumental composition. It
illustrates the dangers of that smaller realism which from Duccio down
afflicted the more progressive painters of Siena. Such a picture enables
us to appreciate the tact and thoughtfulness with which Ambrogio
Lorenzetti approached his narrative themes.
[Illustration:
FIG. 49. Pietro Lorenzetti. Birth of the Virgin.—_Opera del Duomo,
Siena._
]
Ambrogio Lorenzetti was born about the beginning of the century. In 1331
and later he painted remarkable frescoes for the Church of St. Francis.
These if complete would afford the most interesting comparisons with
Giotto at Florence, but the two that remain are among the best narrative
paintings of the time. What will first strike the observer in the story
of St. Louis of Toulouse renouncing his throne as he takes the
Franciscan vow, Figure 50, is the variety and orderliness of the
emotions. The devotion of the saint is well offset by the intense,
melancholy curiosity of his brother Robert, who becomes king through the
sacrifice. The audience is divided into admiring Franciscans and idly
marveling courtiers, the whole well dominated by the kindly and reverend
figure of the Pope. Remarkable is the methodical division of the spaces.
A slender column establishes the picture plane and sets the figures
back. A sort of desk in a hollow square defines and isolates the
monastic group, while the courtiers have their appropriate location in a
third plane of alcoves. Florence has next to nothing of this sort at
this period, and it may be noted that this careful division of spaces is
not matter of display and curiosity as in Duccio, but is logical and
effective as regards the persons of the narrative.
[Illustration:
FIG. 50. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Prince Louis of Toulouse receives the
Franciscan Vow.—_San Francesco, Siena._
]
Of similar significance, but more dramatic and picturesque, is the
martyrdom of the Franciscan missionaries before the Sultan of Morocco.
The elaborated spaces make for clarity, the entirely professional and
impersonal cruelty of the Moorish tyrant and his bodyguard is splendidly
caught and effectively contrasted with the courageous submission of the
martyrs. Lorenzo Ghiberti praises the energy and character of this work,
and the observer of today feels as deeply its romantic appeal. All the
figures are set on receding platforms, the problem of space is solved
along lines of intelligent literalism.[24]
[Illustration:
FIG. 51. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna in Majesty.—_Massa Marittima._
]
It would be a pleasure to dwell on the Madonnas of Ambrogio. The tragic
Madonna of S. Francesco, Figure 33, the Madonna with St. Dorothy and St.
Lucy, in the Siena Academy, the Virgin in Mr. Dan Fellowes Platt’s
collection are among the best. No other early Italian so combined
nobility with motherly warmth. His splendor and sweet dignity may best
be felt in the Majesty of the Virgin, Figure 51, in the little town of
Massa Marittima. The central motive, Mary and the Child embracing, is
almost Ambrogio’s invention. He rings the changes on it in lovely
modulations, while always retaining monumentality. This picture is as
stately as Duccio’s Majesty, and as resplendent as Simone Martini’s,
while having qualities of ardor and fancifulness all its own. The
fairy-like Virtues on the steps of the Madonna’s throne especially show
the rich vein of pure fantasy which accompanied Ambrogio’s robustness.
The picture may be dated about 1336 or later.
Previous to its painting Ambrogio had passed some years at Florence,
where he must have studied and known Giotto, and where he himself
influenced powerfully the beginnings of the new panoramic style.
Whatever frescoes he himself did there have perished, and the only
memorials of his visit are certain delightful little panels telling with
vivacity and utmost circumstantiality the legends of St. Nicholas. At
Florence he must have analyzed Giotto’s great political frescoes, now
lost, which depicted in symbols good and bad government. These were
surely the inspiration for the political symbols and illustrations which
Ambrogio, in the year 1337 and later, painted in the great hall of the
Palazzo Pubblico at Siena.
The most famous is the Allegory of the State. The Commune sits
enthroned, above in the air are the theological virtues—Faith, Hope and
Charity; seated at the side are the four secular virtues—Prudence,
Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude—and with them two additional
personifications useful to a state—Magnanimity and Peace. The graceful
relaxed figure of Peace, Figure 52, with her filmy drapery is famous.
Below the platform on which the Commune sits with attendant virtues, are
the grim, disciplined forms of men-at-arms and a throng of magistrates
and citizenry. At the left are symbolized Concord and Justice as the
supporters of a well-ruled state. Here the symbolism is childishly
obvious. Concord holds her smoothing plane. From her hand go strings
which bind in fellowship a group of citizens below and lead above to the
figure of Justice. Still higher is Wisdom. Justice deals punishment with
one hand and grants aid with the other; the Middle Ages never admitted
that Justice was merely punitive. The figures of Justice and Concord are
superb,—Ambrogio’s Madonna type on a heroic scale.
As a pictorial representation of the finest mediæval ideas of
statecraft, this fresco is of incomparable interest. As a decoration it
is hardly successful. The theme has hampered the artist, the handling of
the figures in several scales with the largest above, produces confusion
and topheaviness. Beautiful in the parts, it is disappointing in the
whole.
Far better merely as decoration is the companion fresco which represents
the Effects of Good Government, Figure 53. We have a peaceful city, the
entrancing spectacle of Siena as she was about the year 1339. Girls are
dancing a carol in the foreground with the quaintest dignity, mounted
merchants are passing, and if the picture were better preserved, we
should see the mechanics—or “artists” as they still call themselves in
Italy—working cheerily in their shops. In its richness without
confusion, this is the very triumph of the panoramic realism which
Ambrogio made popular throughout Italy.
There are many more frescoes in this series, mostly by imitators of
Ambrogio. The Sienese region is full of works by him or by his faithful
followers. His panel pictures are in many galleries of Europe and
America. They all confirm the record of Ghiberti that Ambrogio had the
habits of a nobleman—a great sympathy, a fine scrupulousness, a real
magnanimity. Certain contemporaries seem greater, Giotto surely, Simone
Martini perhaps, but no Italian painter until Raphael himself reveals so
complete and harmonious a development. We find no trace of the brothers
Lorenzetti after 1348. Presumably they perished in the great plague of
that year.
[Illustration:
FIG. 52. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Peace, from the Fresco of Good
Government.—_Palazzo Pubblico, Siena._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 54. Luca Tommé. The Assumption of the Virgin.—_Jarves Coll., New
Haven, Conn._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 53. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Results of Good Government—The Peaceful
City. Fresco.—_Palazzo Pubblico, Siena._
]
For a century after the plague year, 1348, the painters of Siena
imitated either the narrative realism of Ambrogio or the decorative
sparseness of Simone Martini. It is customary to align them as of one
camp or the other. We may indeed say that such painters as Lippo Memmi,
Andrea Vanni, and Naddo Ceccarelli faithfully echo Simone, while such a
master as the influential Bartolo di Fredi, who is traceable as late as
1388, seems completely Lorenzettian. But most of the painters follow
freely both tendencies, employing Simone’s formulas in altar-pieces with
few figures, and Ambrogio’s in narrative. Such eclecticism produced
abundantly works of charm, for delicate sentiment and ornate
workmanship, but rather few works of originality. Perhaps because of
willingly accepted limitations, the average is higher than that of
Florence. Throughout Italy it was a more popular style than the
Florentine. It dominated the coast region from Naples to Valencia,
penetrated into Umbria and the Adriatic marshes, and even got a
temporary foothold in Florence itself. It fitted in better with mediæval
ideals than the art of Giotto and Orcagna, which implied classical
antiquity and anticipated the humanism of the Renaissance. On the whole
Sienese art runs down after the Lorenzetti died, losing the robustness
which Ambrogio had learned of Giotto, but its decline is gentle and
interrupted by beneficent reactions towards its established glories. We
may pass rapidly, and chiefly considering types, the fifty-odd years
between the Lorenzetti and the new century.
Luca Tommé is credited with an exquisite little Assumption, Figure 54,
in the Jarves Collection at Yale University. The picture, though it may
be as late as 1370, repeats loyally the formulas which Pietro Lorenzetti
invented nearly fifty years earlier. Perhaps Bartolo di Fredi, a rather
superficial and over-fecund artist, best represents the average
condition as the fourteenth century closed. In such a panel as the
Adoration of the Magi, in the Siena Academy, Figure 55, we see the
familiar theme for the first time expanded in a Lorenzettian sense. It
becomes a pageant, probably under the influence of contemporary mystery
plays. It is best conceived in the little scenes in the background; the
facial types and the simplified setting on the whole recall Simone
Martini. In other narrative pictures Bartolo vies with Ambrogio
Lorenzetti in complication of planes and architecture. On the whole he
is a rather faint echo, but his note while thin is also true.
[Illustration:
FIG. 55. Bartolo di Fredi. Adoration of the Magi.—_Siena._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 56. Barna. The Transfiguration.—_Collegiata, S. Gemignano._
]
The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the
mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Passion we see in the
Collegiate Church of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone
Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all
accessories, and powerfully impressive for this reason. The mood is
brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a
kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese
country. In the fresco of the Transfiguration, Figure 56, he rises to
sublimity. Fra Angelico will merely repeat him in San Marco sixty years
later. Vasari tells us that Barna died from a fall from his painting
scaffold in 1381, and that he was then young. If so, his originality was
tremendous, for he cleared away ruthlessly all the delightful but
trivial stage furniture so diligently collected by Duccio and the
Lorenzetti. Modern criticism ascribes to him several panels, and I
venture to add to the list the simple and stately Marriage of St.
Catherine in the Boston Museum of Art. Certainly it is one of the most
serious creations of the period. The type of the Christ and the concise
and characterful arrangement seem to mark it as a fine Barna. The base
is interesting, representing the composing of a blood feud, and Miracles
of St. Michael and St. Margaret. While the simple pattern continues the
tradition of Simone, Barna avoids Simone’s linear grace-notes. The
finical element of the predecessor yields to a kind of realism. Barna is
really the critic of the Sienese school. He silently insists that one
may be decorative without too much artifice, and dramatic without
overtaxing the stage carpenter, a very solitary and elevated spirit, to
whom full justice has not yet been done.
[Illustration:
FIG. 57. The Three Living and Three Dead, detail from the Lorenzettian
fresco, The Triumph of Death.—_Campo Santo, Pisa._
]
Most remarkable among the works inspired by the Lorenzetti is the
coarsely effective Triumph of Death, Figure 57. in the famous cemetery
cloister, Campo Santo, at Pisa. It represents the hazards of the mortal
life in view of certain death and judgment. At the left a royal hunting
party is stopped short by the sight and stench of three festering bodies
in coffins. The Hermit, Saint Macarius, points the obvious lesson that
kings and lords and fair ladies will turn to dust. In the centre,
miserable folk beckon and cry to Death to descend and put them out of
their distress. The harridan death ignores the prayer and flies over a
pile of corpses towards a gay garden party. Death loves to cut down the
young and gay and happy, leaving the old and crippled to prolonged
sorrow. In the upper left hand corner you have monks going about their
quiet pursuits. The whole adjoining fresco is given up to the lives of
such desert saints. At the upper right are angels and fiends struggling
for little nude forms that represent human souls. This motive is a sort
of overflow from a picture of the Last Judgment. The grim moral of the
three pictures is that the worldly life is one of mortal peril, which
may best be avoided by renouncing the world and joining a monastic
order. The work was completed about 1375, is in the rougher following of
the Lorenzetti, and has been famous ever since it was painted on the
cloister wall. Entirely Sienese in its conception, in its ruggedness it
transcends the usual softness of the school. It is the last significant
work of the 14th century.
Siena passed into the fifteenth century without greatly changing her
art. In the work of such traditional figures as Taddeo Bartoli one may
observe a certain coarsening of the tradition. Mere splendor tends to
replace the old delicacy, narrative painting becomes ever more
complicated and confused. The latter tendency is manifested in frescoes
which Domenico di Bartolo painted, between 1440 and 1443 for the
Hospital of the Scala, Figure 58. Their crowded picturesqueness grows
legitimately out of the Lorenzettian tradition, as does the elaboration
of architectural accessories. But the work also implies a certain
knowledge of the current Florentine discoveries in linear perspective
and in architecture. A small ingenuity runs pretty wild in these
decorations, valuable as they are in picturing the times.
[Illustration:
FIG. 58. Domenico di Bartolo. Clothing the Naked, from fresco series,
the Seven Acts of Mercy.—_Scala Hospital, Siena._
]
About the time these frescoes were designed, a renovation of Sienese
painting was being made along divergent lines by Stefano di Giovanni,
nicknamed Sassetta,[25] and by the eager eccentric, Giovanni di Paolo.
In both cases we have a reactionary reform. Sassetta restudies devoutly
Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti, infusing his own tender mysticism
both into decoration and narrative. In a manner he combines the two
great currents of Siena’s past. We may best approach him through the
triptych of the Birth of the Virgin in the Collegiate church at Asciano,
Figure 59. It is his earliest work painted not much later than 1428
when, being thirty-five years old, he joined the Painters’ Guild. The
picture is conceived in the strictest Lorenzettian fashion, the frame
being treated as the front or extension of the painted architecture.
Aside from this carefully constructed setting, with its successive
spaces, the casual and familiar distribution of the figures suggests
strongly Pietro Lorenzetti. But the rich accessories in Sassetta’s hands
are delicately selected, the humble gestures have an artless grace, the
secondary figures such as the brocaded handmaid entering from the rear
are fascinating in their own right. An air of alert gentleness runs
through the picture. It is shared by persons of all ages. Such episodes
as the chatting of two old men before a respectfully listening urchin
add nothing to the story but strongly reinforce the faery charm of the
whole. Winsomeness has supplanted the monumental quality of the older
school. Above in the side gables are the scenes of the passing of the
Virgin’s soul and her funeral procession, both conceived in the manner
of the Lorenzetti. But the familiar forms are singularly animated by a
new spirit of tenderness. By a paradox these little stories are really
more like Duccio than any intervening work.
[Illustration:
FIG. 59. Sassetta. The Birth of the Virgin.—_Asciano._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 60. Sassetta. Marriage of St. Francis to Poverty.—_Chantilly,
France._
]
[Illustration:
FIG. 61. Sassetta. Temptation of St. Anthony.—_Jarves Coll., New
Haven, Conn._
]
Sassetta painted seven years on his masterpiece, the now scattered
_ancona_ for the Franciscan Church at Borgo San Sepolcro. The central
panel was a St. Francis in ecstacy, now in Bernard Berenson’s
collection. On the back were eight of the legends of the “Fioretti.” The
panel was finished in 1444. Especially delightful is the panel at
Chantilly which represents St. Francis’s mystical betrothal with
Poverty, Figure 60. This scene is before Monte Amiata, spaced off from
the group by checkerboard fields. The maidens, Chastity and Obedience,
sway lily-like beside their more resolute sister, Poverty, upon whose
timidly offered hand the little saint firmly fixes a ring. Above, the
celestial trio rises over the mountain line, Poverty turning a regretful
face to her humble bridegroom. The simple pattern with its swaying lines
derives from Simone Martini, but there is none of his petulant
superiority in it, none of his nervousness. The realm is not the airless
heights of a pure æstheticism but a very human dreamland. Again Duccio
at his best is the closest analogy. Bernard Berenson in his admirable
little book _A Painter of the Franciscan Legend_ well describes the
technical perfection of such work as this. It is conceived in “outlines
which have in themselves an energy and vitality, that, whether they are
representative or calligraphic, give off values of movement, and values
of movement have the power to suggest the unembodied, life unclogged by
matter, something in brief that comes close to the utmost limits of what
visual art can do to evoke spirit.”
Apart from these sublimated reveries of Sassetta which express
themselves in utmost delicacy of line, hue, and touch, he had a
refreshing, drastic, almost a humorous side, which may be exemplified in
a Temptation of St. Antony, Figure 61, in the Jarves Collection at New
Haven. Beside his coral-red hut in a desert bounded by a wood that seems
the world’s end, the Saint starts away from a demure and very plain
little girl. He is perplexed, divining rather than seeing the tiny bats’
wings which mark her as a demon. The horizon is so curved that one
almost feels the old earth swinging unconcernedly beneath this dilemma.
A picture full of grotesque and authentic imagination, most true to the
hobgoblin tradition of the expiring Middle Ages.
Sassetta died in 1450, and his two long-lived pupils, Sano di Pietro
(1406–1481) and Giovanni di Paolo, (1403–1482) kept something of his
influence alive for still thirty years.
Sano needs few words. He took nothing from his master but certain formal
patterns, fine gilding and blithe colors. He repeats himself tediously,
there are over fifty of his panels in the Siena Academy alone, yet is so
genuine and unpretending that one forgets his lack of delicacy and
insight. A little Coronation of the Virgin, at New Haven, may
sufficiently represent his decorative phase. It is a nosegay of fair
colors on burnished gold. In narrative painting he is Lorenzettian
without the _finesse_ of his master. At least he helped prolong a lovely
tradition beyond its natural term, and that is his chief merit. “A
famous painter and a man wholly dedicated to God”—(_Pictor famosus et
homo lotus deditus Deo_)—we read in his death notice. Siena knew how to
appreciate a traditionalist.
[Illustration:
FIG. 62. Giovanni di Paolo. Young St. John Baptist goes to the
Desert.—_Formerly Charles Butler Coll., London._
]
Giovanni di Paolo, on the contrary, suffered not from deficient
originality but from its excess. He selects restlessly from the older
pictures. You will find pure Duccian figures in his paintings of the
fifties. He studies the sparse decorative perfections of Simone Martini
and exaggerates their nervousness. He drives expression into caricature,
seeks strength in distortion, was the post-impressionist of his day. His
extravagance is unpleasing in his larger pieces, but is piquant enough
in his numerous small panels. One of a pair in English private
possession shows the Youthful St. John jauntily setting off for the
desert, with a quite cubistic treatment, Figure 62, of the lines of the
fields. The motive is still more ingeniously employed in one of a
remarkable set of pictures belonging to Mr. Martin Ryerson of Chicago.
Giovanni’s predilection for distortion and grimace is shown in The
Baptism of Christ, a pendant to the story of the youthful John, both
being parts of one predella.
[Illustration:
FIG. 63. Matteo di Giovanni. Saint Barbara with Saints.—_S. Domenico._
]
Giovanni died in 1482 at the advanced age of seventy-nine, having
faithfully preserved the old Gothic tradition while making it a vehicle
of his own resolute eccentricity.
[Illustration:
FIG. 64. Matteo di Giovanni. Massacre of the Innocents.
]
The slight concession which Siena made to the Renaissance was
inaugurated by Lorenzo Vecchietta, active from about 1440 to 1480. He
was primarily a sculptor and his silver altar-back was deemed worthy, in
1506, to displace the great Majesty of Duccio from the high altar of the
Cathedral. Vecchietta chiefly shows the effect of his studies as
architect and sculptor in a severe regard for anatomy, and in the
Renaissance character of his architectural settings. He painted for the
Cathedral of Pienza a majestic Assumption, his masterpiece. There are
numerous frescoes by him at Siena; he is perhaps most agreeable in
little stories elaborately set amid rich architecture, but he lacks the
sprightliness of the true narrative tradition. “He was a melancholy and
solitary person,” writes Vasari, “and always sunk in thought.” He did
something to give to the Sienese painting of the end of the century a
new and complicating thoughtfulness.
[Illustration:
FIG. 65. Benvenuto of Siena. Assumption of the Virgin.—_Metropolitan
Museum, New York._
]
Far the most versatile painter at Siena in the second half of the
fifteenth century was Matteo di Giovanni.[26] He was not a native, but
born about 1430 at Borgo San Sepolcro in upper Umbria. There he worked
for a time with that stern realist Piero della Francesca. Thus Matteo
brought to Siena better training than his fellows had, but he soon fell
contentedly into the ways of the place. His madonnas and female saints
have a new touch. They are more girlish and fragile than their
predecessors, more exquisite, more fashionable. The type is represented
in dozens of panels of which Enthroned Saint Barbara, at Saint Domencio,
dated 1477, Figure 63, is a fine example.
[Illustration:
FIG. 66. Girolamo di Benvenuto. Love bound by Maidens. Birth
Salver.—_Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn._
]
In such work Matteo continues the tradition of Sassetta along somewhat
superficial lines of prettiness. He is far more original in the several
versions of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which seeking a maximum of
intensity he achieves only a very interesting sort of caricature. The
picture at S. Agostino, Figure 64, dated 1482, is perhaps the best of
the group. We are in the realm of the grisly fairy tale, at an ogre’s
sports. The crowding, tumult, ornate architecture are simply Matteo’s
attempts to refurbish the old Lorenzettian tradition. His real quality
best appears in the outlines prepared for the figure decoration of the
pavement of the Cathedral. In general his is an engaging but entirely
undisciplined talent, oscillating after the fashion of the moment, alike
in Florence and Siena, between mere prettiness and sheer restlessness.
He died in 1495, Michelangelo’s star being already in the ascendent over
neighboring Florence.
A kind of petrification of the traditional charm of Siena is in the work
of Benvenuto di Giovanni, scholar of Sassetta. He cultivates a
resplendent impassivity, is severe without much background of knowledge.
His stiffness is gracious enough, like that of an aristocrat who
maintains amid difficulties the dignity of an older school. His sense of
formal pattern and skill in modeling in a very blond key may be enjoyed
in his versions of the favorite theme of the Assumption. One of the best
of these, dated at the end of the century in the year 1498, is in the
Metropolitan Museum, Figure 65. Benvenuto was born in 1436 and died
about 1518. He might, had he chosen, have studied the whole realistic
development from Fra Angelico to Leonardo da Vinci, but his painting
keeps a chill virginal quality quite apart from life, its problems and
allurements.
His son Girolamo continued the manner with less monumentality until his
death in 1524. To his early activity belongs the delightful salver, Love
Bound by Maidens, Figure 66, in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. It
is merely the tray on which the gifts were presented to a young mother
during the visits of congratulation. It was painted for some member of
the famous Piccolomini family, presumably about the year 1500. The stern
maidens who are plucking and binding the stripling Love, doubtless are
personifications of Chastity, Temperance and the like. In the middle
distance a knight rides off free to adventure since Love is safely
bound. It is an odd theme for a gift to a young bride and mother, but
the Italians never required consistency in their compliments. The
daintiness of the treatment is typical for Renaissance painting at
Siena, which never assumes a robust or realistic or humanistic accent.
There is a refinement which is the harbinger of death. It appears in
Siena in the person of Neroccio di Landi. He sublimates the style of his
great predecessors, Simone and Sassetta, adding freely the more delicate
ornamentation of the Renaissance. There is a peculiar pallor in his
coloring and tension in his modelling. It is an art of nerves and
ecstasies, wholly etherial. An admirable Annunciation in the Jarves
Collection at New Haven shows the rich setting, the odd blend of
precision with a languor that marks Neroccio as true grandson of Simone
Martini. There are many little panels of Madonnas with saints of amber
translucency. They have the startling vividness and irreality of an
hallucination. And there is a portrait of a girl in the Widener
Collection, Figure 67, which is of a superlatively delicate prettiness.
Neroccio was born in 1447 and died in 1500. With him passed the special
fragrance of Sienese art.
Until 1475, Neroccio was in partnership with one whose ambition went far
to destroy what Neroccio and Siena stood for. Francesco di Giorgio was
born in 1439. With an ambition and resolution wholly un-Sienese, he
mastered the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and engineering.
He met Leonardo da Vinci at Pavia, worked for the tyrants of Milan,
competed for the façade of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower at
Florence. As architect and engineer it appears that he became a
cosmopolitan, in painting it was hardly so. He is most delightful in his
early phase which is represented by a bride-chest in the Wheelwright
collection, Boston. It represents Prince Paris insolently appraising the
charms of the rival goddesses, and at the right riding Troywards in
disregard of the despair of forsaken Œnone. The classical theme is
tinged with mediævalism, naturalized as Sienese. Later pictures, such as
The Nativity, Figure 68, in the Sienese gallery, show Francesco uneasy,
twisting his figures for grace and display of knowledge, working over
the old landscape formulas in a semi-realistic sense, adding classical
architecture, generally trying to break the bounds of the old idealism.
The result is restlessness or at best an ambiguous charm. Siena is
beginning to regret her isolation, to make vain efforts to overtake the
tide of humanistic realism, to envy Florence, and even Perugia and
Cortona. From the point of view of the Renaissance she was two
generations behind, and no longer indifferent to the fact.
[Illustration:
FIG. 67. Neroccio di Landi. Portrait of a Girl.—_Widener Coll., Elkins
Park, Pa._
]
Not merely Francesco di Giorgio tries to do in a decade the work of a
century, but such younger contemporaries as Fungai and Pacchiarotti look
to Florence or Umbria. Siena was given no time to reconstruct, and her
old beautiful art could not readily assume new forms. Siena never
assimilated the Renaissance. It invaded her, killed her native art and
substituted one without local flavor. Before Francesco di Giorgio died,
in 1502, he had seen Luca Signorelli called to Siena and the clever
decorator Pintorricchio. Siena no longer trusted her own artists.
Francesco probably took little note of the advent in 1501, of a young
Piedmontese painter, Antonio Bazzi,[27] nicknamed Sodoma, yet with
Sodoma remained what little future there was in Sienese painting.
[Illustration:
FIG. 69. Sodoma. Vision of St. Catherine of Siena. Fresco.—_S.
Domenico, Siena._
]
Sodoma brought to Siena the knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci, the new
draughtsmanship in light and shade. He assimilated the sensibility of
Siena but coarsened it. No painter of the time was more overtly
sentimental. His famous St. Sebastian at Florence tells all that need be
known about him,—his considerable skill, his exaggerated pathos, his
clever use of poise and balance, his sober modern tonalities. His
sentimental power is at its height in the fresco at S. Domenico, Siena,
which represents S. Catherine swooning at the vision of her lover, the
Christ, Figure 69. Sodoma worked indefatigably in and about Siena till
1549. The few local painters of a progressive sort, Domenico Beccafumi,
Girolamo del Pacchia, either directly imitate Sodoma or draw from
similar alien sources. The only man of genius Siena produced in these
years, Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536), soon went to Rome where in
architecture he held his own with all comers, whereas in painting he
became a modest imitator of Raphael.
In the ten years after 1500 the old art perished. Siena from being the
last radiant exemplar of the glory of the mediæval spirit sunk to the
estate of a fourth class station of the Renaissance. Her idealism could
not bear the test of reality. Her domain had been that of legend and
fairy tale and dream, she had ruled it exquisitely for two centuries
until sheer taste had absorbed her little strength. She had left
unforgettable records of her most precious feelings, but little record
of her outer activities. Think how portraits abound in Florentine and
Venetian art after 1450! There are practically none at Siena. So it
would be futile to go to Siena for a greater understanding of the active
life. But if you would requicken the sense of legend, live over again
the tenderness mankind has ever felt for the beautiful past, hear some
faint blowing of the horns of elfland—if you want this experience, then
go to The gracious City of the Virgin and you shall find fulfilled the
generous motto over her main portal—Siena will open her heart wide to
thee.
[Illustration:
FIG. 68. Francesco di Giorgio. Nativity.—_Belle Arti._
]
ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER II
A SONNET TO THE SPENDTHRIFT CLUB
by
FOLGORE DA SAN GEMIGNANO
_translated by_
DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI
“I give you horses for your games in May,
And all of them well trained unto the course—
Each docile, swift, erect, a goodly horse:
With armor on their chests and bells at play
Between their brows, and pennons fair and gay;
Fine nets and housings meet for warriors,
Emblazoned with the shields ye claim for yours,
Gules, argent, or, all dizzy at noon day;
And spears shall split and fruit go flying up
In merry counterchange for wreaths that drop
From balconies and casements far above;
And tender damsels with young men and youths
Shall kiss together on the cheeks and mouths
And every day be glad with joyful love.”
HOW VENUS FARED IN SIENA
Ghiberti, in his commentaries (ed. Frey, Berlin 1886, p. 57 ff.) tells
how a marble Venus, bearing the name of Lysippus was dug up at Siena.
“I saw it only as drawn by a very great painter of the city of Siena,
who was called Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This drawing was kept with
greatest care by a very old Carthusian. This brother was a goldsmith,
and his father, and was a designer and delighted greatly in the art of
sculpture; and he began to tell me how that statue was discovered as
they were making an excavation where now are the houses of the
Malavolti; how all those instructed and versed in the art of
sculpture, with the goldsmiths and painters ran to see this so
marvellous and artistic statue. Every one praised it greatly, and also
the great painters who then were in Siena—to every one it seemed
absolutely perfect. And with all honors they set it upon their
fountain, as a most splendid thing. All gathered to place it with
greatest rejoicing and honor and they fixed it magnificently upon that
fountain, which statue reigned there but passingly.”
“For as the city had many adversities in the war with the Florentines,
and the flower of the citizenry were assembled in council, a citizen
rose and spoke about the statue in this tenor: ‘Gentlemen and
citizens, having considered that since we have found this statue it
has always gone wrong with us, and considering that idolatry is
forbidden by our faith, we must believe of all the adversities which
we have that God sends them for our errors. And behold in truth that
since we have honored this statue we have always gone from bad to
worse. I am certain that so long as we keep it in our territory it
will always go wrong with us. As a councillor I would advise that it
be taken down and shattered and split up and be sent to be buried on
the soil of the Florentines.’
“Unanimously they confirmed the words of their citizen and put them in
execution, and the statue was buried upon our soil.”
A PROCESSION ON THE COMPLETION OF DUCCIO’S MAJESTY
“On the day that it was carried to the Duomo the shops were shut; and
the Bishop bade a goodly and devout company of priests and friars
should go in solemn procession, accompanied by the Nine Magistrates
and all the officers of the Commune and all the people; all the most
worthy followed close upon the picture, according to their degree,
with lights burning in their hands; and then behind them came the
women and children with great devotion. And they accompanied the said
picture as far as the Duomo, making procession round the Campo as is
the use, all the bells sounding joyously for devotion of so noble a
picture as is this. And all that day they offered up prayers, with
great alms to the poor, praying God and His Mother who is our
advocate, that he may defend us in His infinite mercy from all
adversity and all evil, and that He may keep us from the hands of
traitors and enemies of Siena.”
Translated in Edmund G. Gardiner’s _The Story of Siena_, p. 178, from
the Anonymous contemporary chronicler published by A. Lisini in
_Notizie di Duccio_.
A CONTRACT FOR AN ALTAR-PIECE BY PIETRO LORENZETTI
“Master Pietro, son of the late Lorenzetto, who was of Siena, solemnly
and willingly promises and agrees with the venerable Father Guido, by
God’s grace Bishop of Arezzo, who stipulates in the name and stead of
the people of St. Mary of Arezzo—to paint a panel of the Blessed
Virgin Mary, ... in the centre of which panel shall be a likeness of
the Virgin Mary with her Son and with four side figures according to
the wish of the aforesaid Lord Bishop, working in the backgrounds of
these figures with finest gold leaf, 100 leaves to a florin, ... and
the other ornaments of silver and of best and choicest colors; and
using in these five figures best ultramarine blue; and in the other
adjoining and surrounding spaces (panels) of this picture to be
painted likenesses of prophets and saints, according to the wish of
this Lord Bishop, with good and choice colors.”
“It must be six braccia long and five braccia high in the middle,
apart from two columns each a half braccia wide, and in each should be
six figures worked with the aforesaid gold, and the work shall be
approved by this Lord Bishop....”
“And he [Pietro Lorenzetti] must begin this work according to the wish
of this Lord Bishop, immediately after the wooden panel shall have
been made, and must continue in this work until the completion of this
picture, not undertaking any other work &c. And therefore the said
Lord Bishop Guido promises to have given and assigned to him the panel
made of wood; and to pay him for his wages for the picture and for
colors, gold and silver one hundred and sixty Pisan lire; that is the
third part at the beginning of the work, the third part at the middle
of the work, and the remaining third part when the work is finished
and complete &c.”
“Done in the church of the Holy Angels in Arcalto outside of and next
to the cemetery.”
Translated and slightly abridged from Borghesi and Banchi, _Nuovi
Documenti per la Storia dell’ Arte Senese_, (Doc. 6, p. 10) Siena,
1898.
This contract well illustrates the elaborateness and strictness of
such agreements. It may be compared with the picture itself (Fig. 46).
Apparently the artist persuaded the Bishop to give up the plan of
twelve prophets and saints on two side pilasters, and made instead a
greater number (15) of figures in the upper arcade and pinnacles.
[Illustration:
FIG. 70. Andrea del Castagno. David, Slayer of Goliath. Parade
Shield.—_Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa._
]