Siena in the early fourteenth century was one of the world’s richest cities and home to some of the most influential artists in Europe. For two generations, up to the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348, its painters and sculptors engaged in a nonstop flurry of experimentation and innovation, changing almost all aspects of art, from the basic design of the altarpiece to the techniques of fresco and panel painting; perhaps most importantly, they nurtured a new emphasis on the naturalistic depiction of the world. The inventiveness of their art was so dazzling that they were called to work all over Italy and abroad: Florence, Assisi, Naples, Milan, and the papal court at Avignon. The spread of their influence had the most profound consequences for the later development of painting and sculpture throughout the Continent.

Despite this achievement, in the modern era Siena has often been seen as little more than a charming backwater whose art was of secondary importance compared with that of Florence, its rival and neighbor. The painting of Siena, we have been told, was lyrical, mystical, and medieval, while that of Florence was heroic, empirical, and forward-looking. This distortion was partly based on the bias of Giorgio Vasari and his book Lives of the Artists, which he wrote in the mid-sixteenth century to celebrate the preeminence of Florentines, from Giotto to Michelangelo.

Until recently most critics repeated these legends in textbooks and lecture halls all over the world. During the last fifty years, however, art historians began to attack the traditional view. Some showed the unreliability of Vasari’s book: his accounts of Sienese artists are riddled with errors big and small, and he was writing at a time when Florence was conquering Siena. Others commented on the surprising fact that in the fourteenth century almost no Florentine artist found work in Siena, while many Sienese artists won important commissions in Florence. Indeed, it was Arnolfo di Cambio, an architect and sculptor born in the Sienese countryside and trained in a workshop in Siena and Pisa, who planned the cathedral of Florence, and it was Ugolino di Nerio, a Sienese painter, who made the high altarpieces of the new, huge mendicant churches in Florence, Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce. The Sienese masters Duccio, Tino di Camaino, and Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti also took on major projects in Florence.

As the scales fell from scholars’ eyes, dozens of experts, including Luciano Bellosi, Andrea De Marchi, and Hayden Maginnis, wrote new, revelatory studies of early Sienese painting, while other historians, including Joanna Cannon and Donal Cooper, probed the patronage of the Dominican and Franciscan orders, which was so fundamental for Italian art of the period. These scholars have completely transformed our understanding of Sienese art.

“Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” is the first exhibition to bring this new view to a wider public outside Italy. With only about fifty pictures as well as other works of art, it is smaller than many of the blockbuster shows held in the past at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, yet it is no less ambitious in the claims it puts forth.

One reason for its success is the beauty and intelligence of the installation. The rooms are pale gray and deep green and evoke the dark, soaring interior of the cathedral of Siena, and the lighting, while focused and precise, has a soothing, candle-like radiance. The cool tones of the galleries and the warm glow of the paintings and sculptures combine to create an overall sense of refuge, as if you had entered another, more sacred realm.

More important still is the clear narrative structure that the Met curator Stephan Wolohojian has given the show. He planned it so that viewers, with only minimal guidance from the brief wall texts, can teach themselves about the distinctive character of Sienese art simply by walking through the galleries and studying what is on display. This is a show that invites and rewards unhurried looking.

The first gallery is a comparatively small space with just four works of art, yet together they establish the major compass points in the cultural and spiritual geography of Siena. Straight ahead as you walk in is a diminutive panel of the Madonna and Child that was made in the late thirteenth century by Duccio, the artist who launched the new era in Sienese painting. The Met acquired this gem twenty years ago for a colossal sum, but never before has it been so beautifully displayed. You can see every detail, every brushstroke, and the relationship of the Madonna and the Child seems especially tender, natural, and affecting.

One theme of the exhibition is that Siena, located on the via Francigena—the major route for pilgrims and traders between northwestern Europe and Rome—was a crossroads between the sacred traditions of Byzantine art and the stylistic advances of Gothic France. To make this point from the start, the Madonna and Child by Duccio is flanked by two other works of the same subject, one from the east and one from the north.

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To the left of the Duccio is a small painted icon made in Constantinople and likely brought to Siena in the thirteenth century. Comparatively crudely painted, it is nevertheless a work of great emotional intensity; the bloodshot eyes of the Madonna show that she is already aware of the terrible sacrifice her beloved son must someday make. In Italy around 1300, Byzantine art was thought to have a heightened degree of authenticity—it was seen to come from the Holy Land—and looking at this picture one can understand why.

To the right of the Duccio is a small ivory made in Paris around 1260–1280. A work of extraordinary charm, it shows the Virgin and Child in a moment of loving playfulness, as each gazes into the face of the other. The winning naturalness of the depiction is combined with the most sophisticated rendering of form: the full volumes of the figures and the sharp-edged folds of the drapery recall monuments of high classical sculpture. The French Gothic had a huge influence on Sienese art in the decades around 1300, especially in the dramatic sculptures of Giovanni Pisano, which adorned the walls of the city’s cathedral.

The most important axis in Sienese art, however, was not between east and west or north and south; it was between heaven and earth. This is shown by the fourth work in the room, the painfully beautiful head of Christ from a crucifix by Lando di Pietro, a Sienese goldsmith. Life-size, painted naturalistically, and carved in the comparably yielding material of wood, it is a work of astonishing presence. The pathos of the sculpture is amplified by the real damage it has suffered: the crucifix was all but destroyed in an Allied bombardment of Siena in 1944, and only the head, badly split down the middle, survives. Such is its powerful believability that looking at it, you imagine you see dirt and sweat in Christ’s matted and tangled hair.

Remarkably, the destruction of the sculpture revealed a prayer written on parchment by Lando and embedded in it. This may be among the most explicit statements of intention by an artist to survive from the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. It begins with the words, “The Lord God made Lando di Pietro of Siena sculpt this cross in wood in similitude of the real Jesus Christ…to give memory to viewers of the Passion.” Following invocations of aid from the Virgin and other holy figures, Lando implores that he and his family might be saved and begs God to show mercy to all of humanity.

To understand this prayer, and more generally the sacred character of Sienese art, it helps to recall the startling combination of splendor and terror that was common in fourteenth-century Italy. It was a time of unprecedented prosperity. The agrarian revolution of the late Middle Ages, the application of mechanization to almost every industry, and the great expansion of trade caused wealth and population to grow rapidly. Enriched by the discovery of silver in the hills outside Siena, which was fundamental for commerce and banking throughout Europe and Asia, the city participated fully in this boom. Its population tripled during Duccio’s lifetime, between the mid-thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries. The municipal government, imagining that the good times would go on, expanded the town walls, erected the Palazzo Pubblico—the city hall—enlarged the cathedral, and underwrote the patronage of art throughout Siena.

Yet even before the devastation of the bubonic plague in 1348, death and destruction were ever present. Infant mortality was so high in premodern Europe that typically a couple needed to produce many live births to have a chance of seeing any children at all make it to adulthood. Famine was always just one bad season away; too little rain, as in 1304, or too much, as in 1305, meant that everyone went hungry. Epidemics, too, were a constant threat. Life was so perilous in early-fourteenth-century Siena that roughly one out of every three years was a time of grim affliction: contagion, hunger, death, fear.

No wonder an artist would implant a prayer in a sculpture; no wonder a picture by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the exhibition gives thanks to a saint for ending famine. As Hayden Maginnis has suggested, Sienese art expressed the hope “that something other than mere chance governed the affairs of men.” It was perhaps for this reason that even in years of calamity, such as during the famine of 1329 and the plague of 1339, the city government continued to discuss funds for painting and sculpture.

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The signature on Duccio’s Maestà also is a prayer, imploring the Virgin to protect Siena and the artist. Erected on the central altar of the cathedral of the city in 1311, the painting was one of the largest on wood ever made: more than sixteen feet wide and nearly as tall. It was double-sided; the front depicted the Madonna and Child enthroned and flanked by saints and angels, while the back had scenes from the lives of Christ and Mary. It is today regarded as one of the supreme landmarks of Italian art. But in the late eighteenth century, during a low moment in the fortunes of Gothic painting, the altarpiece was brutally dismantled. Most of the front and much of the back were preserved and still can be seen in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Siena, but about twenty-five small panels were lost or sold off.

In a miracle of museum diplomacy, the Met has brought together ten narrative pictures from the bottom tier (called a predella) of the altarpiece. With their boldly gesturing figures and stripped-down settings, these two scenes from the life of Mary and eight scenes from the life of Jesus glorify the second room of the show. The presence of parts of this masterpiece allows us to see something of the undaunted ambition of Sienese painters to reimagine the possibilities of the altarpiece; they never tired of experimenting with its forms and architecture. The panels suggest, too, the deep love of narrative in Sienese art. From the beginning of the thirteenth century, painters there regularly displayed a gift for storytelling; they saw life on earth as a crisis, and only narrative could capture its character as an unresolved pilgrimage between peril and salvation.

Duccio’s genius extended to innovation in the techniques of tempera painting. Although he used the same pigments as artists of earlier generations, he blended them in new ways to expand the chromatic range of the palette. He especially loved soft secondary colors, such as lavender, rose, and pale blue, and he painted with smaller brushes than had been common, rendering form and light and shadow with greater precision and delicacy. This can be seen especially in the two triptychs by him in the show—one depicting the Crucifixion with Saints Nicholas and Clement, and a second depicting the Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Aurea—which generally are in better condition than the panels from the Maestà.

The inventive, exploratory character of Duccio’s art inspired painters of the next generation in Siena, many of whom had worked in his studio. This is particularly evident in two works in the following gallery. In another astonishing loan, the Met has managed to obtain an enormous altarpiece, known as the Pieve Polyptych, made by Pietro Lorenzetti beginning in 1320 for the church of Santa Maria della Pieve in Arezzo (see illustration on page 19). Consisting of five panels, each more than seven feet tall, this is perhaps the largest early Italian painting ever exhibited in America.

The other star work in this room is a portable altarpiece by Simone Martini, commissioned by the Sienese government in the 1320s. Simone was one of the great wizards of painting technique. He used colors in startling combinations—for example, peach with magenta and saffron with malachite—and he seemingly built up his pictures in more layers of paint and glaze than any artist before him, giving them an extraordinary richness and luster. In his history of art written in the mid-fifteenth century, the Florentine sculptor and painter Lorenzo Ghiberti praised Simone’s images for being “marvelously colored” and “delicately finished,” and here you can see what he meant.

Another important section of the show displays works for private devotion; these galleries pull viewers even more deeply into the emotional world of Sienese artists and patrons. Made for meditation in the isolation of one’s room, these small paintings are of remarkable intensity. We can get an idea of their spellbinding power, for example, from an image of the Madonna and Child that Simone possibly made for a nun in Orvieto around 1325. We see her kneeling in prayer in the lower right corner of the picture, and incredibly the panel bears evidence of exactly how she used it. The edges of the frame show wear from being held in her hands; the back of the panel was partly silvered and polished so that it could serve as a rudimentary mirror, in an act of both literal and moral reflection; and the faces of the Madonna and Child are more abraded than the other areas of the picture, likely from being touched and kissed.

Many of the panels for private devotion depict scenes from Christ’s Passion, and several contemporary religious texts suggest exactly what viewers should feel while contemplating such images. These writings include the Tree of Life by Saint Bonaventure; the Meditations on the Life of Christ, likely by a friar living in San Gimignano, near Siena; and a long narrative poem describing the Crucifixion, possibly by Pietro Lorenzetti’s brother-in-law. Over and over again, they instruct the faithful to gaze intently with the “eye of compassion” and to imagine experiencing what every single figure, whether saint or sinner, is thinking and feeling; only by this means can one fully imprint the scene, in all its gravity and import, on the soul. Concern for depicting the “motions of the mind” is often associated with the Florentine Renaissance and artists such as Leon Battista Alberti and Leonardo da Vinci, but already in the early fourteenth century Sienese painters were investigating how to achieve fullness and precision in the depiction of human emotion. This precedent is not a coincidence: we know from Ghiberti’s history, for example, that he deeply admired Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s capacity to show thought, “fervor…anxiety…breathlessness…fear” and other states.

‘Christ Carrying the Cross’; panel from the Orsini Polyptych by Simone Martini

Musée du Louvre, Paris/RMN-Grand Palais/Gérard Blot

‘Christ Carrying the Cross’; panel from the Orsini Polyptych by Simone Martini, circa 1335

The final rooms of the exhibition help demonstrate the great influence of Sienese painting on the arts in northern Europe. In another remarkable loan, the Met has reassembled the four dispersed panels of the small and exquisite Orsini Polyptych, which Simone Martini likely painted for a cardinal at the papal court of Avignon. Depicting the Annunciation and the death and burial of Christ, these pictures are crowded with richly colored figures gesturing and emoting in explosions of operatic intensity. Such works were treasured by artists, dukes, and kings throughout France, Burgundy, and Bohemia; the vital current of their example can still be seen in the early fifteenth century in such paintings as those by the Limbourg Brothers in the celebrated illuminated manuscript on view, The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry (1409).

The display of pictures in New York is complemented by a beautiful array of carefully chosen sculptures in ivory and marble as well as works in gold, silver, and enamel. One fascinating section has a variety of contemporary textiles from Spain and the East, whose ornamental luxuriousness so deeply stimulated Sienese painters. These additions contribute significantly to the show’s success in recreating a sense of a lost world.

The Black Death of 1348 killed about half of the population of Siena, including most painters and sculptors. The city was never again in the forefront of commerce or the arts. At the end of the fourteenth century Florence rose to unrivaled supremacy in central Italy. The artists there in the early 1400s often dreamed of classical Rome as the foundation for the new era they were ushering in. Yet very often they were looking to Siena as well for models of excellence in painting and sculpture, from naturalism in the convincing depiction of three-dimensional space to power in the portrayal of human emotion. We can see this in Ghiberti’s emulation of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Donatello’s love of Giovanni Pisano, and Fra Angelico’s study of Duccio and Simone Martini. The brilliant “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” allows us to grasp, as never before in an exhibition outside of Italy, just how deeply important early Sienese art was in its own right and for the advances of later centuries. As Ghiberti wrote, the city was “full of admirable geniuses” about whom enough cannot be said.