Volume 27, Number 18 · November 20, 1980
A Misfit Master
By John Pope-Hennessy
Duccio: Tuscan Art and the Medieval Workshop
by John White
Thames & Hudson, 280, 191 illus pp., $37.50
Duccio di Buoninsegna and His School
by James H. Stubblebine
Princeton University Press, 2 vols, 540, 600 illus pp., $55.00
The Maestà the high altarpiece painted by Duccio for the Cathedral in Siena, is arguably the greatest panel painting that has ever been produced. On the unusually wide main panel are the Virgin and Child enthroned with saints and angels. Beneath it and above it are a narrative predella with scenes from the infancy of Christ, and seven scenes from the life of the Virgin. On the back there were originally forty-two scenes from the New Testament. When it was completed, in 1311, the main panel must have looked physically more convincing, that is more tactile and more lifelike, than any painting in Siena that had preceded it, and the narrative panels must have seemed bewildering in their abundance and inventiveness. They evinced a variety of structure for which there was no precedent, and established almost all the compositional devices used by painters in Siena through the first half of the fourteenth century.
Review, 2286 words
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