The Sienese painters who sparked a revolution in European art

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

‘Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350’, on view in New York until late January and opening in London in March, begins and ends with two jewel-like paintings that define the geographical and chronological scope of the exhibition. In the Stoclet Madonna (c. 1290–1300), a tiny poplar panel sheathed in gold leaf and painted with precious pigments, Duccio di Buoninsegna drew on traditions of Byzantine icons and French ivories to reimagine the subject of the Virgin and Child as a moment of tender interaction between mother and son. In Christ Discovered in the Temple, which Simone Martini painted more than 40 years later in Avignon, the most radical of the generation of painters immediately after Duccio recast that relationship. Here, Mary and Joseph reproach Jesus for going missing during a trip to Jerusalem, their remonstrating gestures silhouetted against the gold ground. Their 12-year-old, framed by the prickly tooling of an ornamental border, folds his arms against his chest, unmoved. The mother who once held her son close now addresses him across an unbridgeable divide as he sets out on his own journey toward the Passion.

Christ Discovered in the Temple (1342), Simone Martini. National Museums Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery

Organised by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London, the exhibition brings together more than a hundred paintings, ivories, textiles, sculptures, manuscripts and works in precious metal to trace pictorial invention in the first half of the 14th century in Siena. Its protagonists are represented by some of their most revolutionary works, which include rare loans and once-in-a-lifetime reunions of multi-part paintings now dispersed in collections across Europe and the United States. Of special note are all eight surviving panels from the back predella of Duccio’s altarpiece for Siena cathedral, a masterclass in visual narrative reassembled for the first time in centuries. Brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, vanguards of the next generation, are represented by Pietro’s polyptych for the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo along with his rare painted panel crucifix, cut and bevelled along its contours to verge on sculpture, and Ambrogio’s Madonna del Latte and Annunciation, paintings about painting that are at once archaising and altogether new. Simone’s Orsini Polyptych has been reunited for the first time since the early 19th century: comprising four double-sided panels hinged together to fold and unfold concertina-style, it invited its first beholders to take it up in the hands and look closely. The exhibition’s chronological narrative is punctuated by a series of thematic groupings, which include Siena’s role as a mercantile centre on an important trade route, innovative formats such as independent panels and portable altarpieces, and silk textiles that the Sienese painters represented in their works both to describe the world around them and to rethink painting from within. The edited volume that accompanies the exhibition develops the art historical and thematic narratives further, with essays on selected works as well as themes such as portable panel paintings, the relationship of paintings with textiles, metalwork and ivories, and exchanges between art in Siena and the courts of Avignon, Bohemia and England.

Madonna and Child (c. 1290–1300), Duccio di Buoninsegna. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The loans and reunions are reason enough to see the show. Another is the marvellous gathering of works in mediums beyond painting, beginning in the first gallery with the display of a 13th-century Byzantine icon along with its gem-studded gold cover, and continuing throughout the show with, for example, textiles from central Asia, Iran, Anatolia and Iberia, as well as the Italian peninsula. The range of objects makes us pay renewed attention to paintings not as disembodied images or transparent windows, but as physical objects in the world. In a few instances, lighting and installation regrettably create the opposite effect: the unevenly lit vitrine for a Virgin and Child by Simone from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum obscures the panel’s silvered verso; a wall-bound installation of the same artist’s Palazzo Pubblico altarpiece makes it difficult to understand how the work was designed to be displayed, reconfigured and transported. On the other hand, the display of Pietro Lorenzetti’s Pieve altarpiece exposes its front and back, allowing visitors to study the craft of the 14th-century carpentry and its modern conservation. Simone’s Orsini Polyptych is arranged to emphasise the flexibility of its format. And an upward sweep of unbuilt space above the long vitrine that holds the predella of Duccio’s Maestà gives a sense of the sheer scale of the main section of the altarpiece that remains in Siena.

Together, the exhibition and accompanying volume create a framework that encourages us to ask new questions about individual works and explore broader patterns across the period. At the same time, that framework is to be questioned and expanded. In both exhibition and book, Siena’s wider worlds – the city’s relationship with artistic centres across Europe, not least the court of Naples – are too circumscribed. The Met presentation gestures towards these worlds with the museum’s recently acquired Bohemian Virgin and Child; one expects that the National Gallery will do the same with its own Wilton Diptych, from England. But, instead of seeing Sienese painting radiating to European centres via Avignon, we might rather think of a constellation of interconnected centres including Siena, and trace the rise of painting from their complex cultural relationships.

The Annunciation (1344), Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. Photo: © Studio Lensini Siena

The wood panel on which Simone painted his Christ Discovered in the Temple bears no physical evidence that it was part of a larger ensemble. Its verso is painted in a swirl of red and green pigment to resemble marble. The picture’s stand-alone format, its play with abstraction and the family drama it unfolds are the exhibition’s closing argument that Sienese painting in the first half of the 14th century shaped art in Europe well into the modern period. And yet, even taken entirely on its own terms, as this tour de force of an exhibition demonstrates, painting in Siena was conceptually radical, formally experimental and deeply human.

‘Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350’ is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, until 26 January.

From the January 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.