The Brooklyn Rail

In Giorgio Vasari’s canonical The Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1568), two pages are devoted to Duccio di Buoninsegna, “painter of Siena,” and twenty-two pages to Giotto “Painter, Sculptor, and Architect, of Florence.” Vasari’s Florentine-centered story of art in Italy starts with Giovanni Cimabue and Giotto and continues in the fifteenth century with Masaccio and his successors. But the great Sienese artists are marginalized. And this bias of a pioneering Tuscan commentator has had lasting effects. Even today, many art tourists, who allow themselves a week to “do” Florence, often take just a day trip to Siena, which is less than fifty miles away. Like James Bond in the opening of Quantum of Solace (2008), they just don’t devote much time to this fascinating city.

Thanks to four remarkable painters—Duccio, Simone Martini, and the brothers Pietro Lorenzetti and Ambrogio Lorenzetti—Siena had a major, highly distinctive visual culture in the first half of the fourteenth century. Siena’s Proto-Renaissance thus started at about the same time as Florence’s. But it ended sooner, for in 1350 the plague killed more than half of the population, including most of the artists in this show. And then there really were no major Sienese successors to these early figures—no equivalents to Vasari’s Masaccio, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo. The proper appreciation of art from Siena was a belated development. Nowadays, however, it is properly appreciated. On show at the Metropolitan Museum is Duccio’s Madonna and Child (ca. 1290–1300), which has a very long label of donors, because it was famously expensive when purchased in 2004. Obviously his Maestà (1308–11), which is fourteen feet tall, cannot travel to Manhattan. Dismembered in the eighteenth century, when Early Renaissance-Sienese art was out of fashion, the front and back panels were separated. The large image on the front of the Holy Virgin remains in Siena. But some of the small back panels, individual narrative scenes, now reside in museums in New York, London, Washington D.C., Madrid, and Fort Worth. Eight of them are assembled in this show.

The aim of this massive exhibition, which contains more than one-hundred paintings, sculptures, metalworks, and fabrics, is to demonstrate the seminal importance of Sienese art. Siena: The Rise of Painting focuses on the portable paintings. Forty years ago, thanks to the Met’s great Caravaggio and Manet retrospectives, I became an art historian. It was thrilling to see a large body of their artworks gathered together. But I am uncertain whether this show will have a similar effect on some young visitor, simply because without seeing the major altarpieces, some of the crucial features of Sienese art are hard to imagine. In her catalogue essay, “The Cathedral of Siena and the Prestige of Sienese Painting,” Joanna Cannon writes that Duccio wanted to explore two aspects of narrative time—simultaneity and sequence—as articulated by architectural settings Whereas the single large-scale field of the main image of the front of the altarpiece functioned powerfully when viewed from a distance, the events in the small-scale scenes of the reverse could only be seen in detail when approached from close by.

True enough, but to see that for yourself, you need to be able to look at the large altarpieces. And Pietro Lorenzetti’s Tarlati Altarpiece (ca. 1320), which is ten feet tall, is the only work here that reveals this important effect, although this installation is not entirely satisfactory. The dark galleries with temporary black pillars give you the feeling that you are wandering in a cave filled with golden Sienese paintings. And because the weighty catalogue, which is a valuable presentation of current research, has many essays by specialists, it’s hard for a synthesis to emerge. I urge, then, that you supplement it with Timothy Hyman’s more accessible and mercifully brief Sienese Painting (2003). (Also useful for the historical background: Siena: City of Secrets [2015] by Jane Tylus.) Since not every visitor knows Italy, adding a map and video to this show would have been most useful. And including a large model of Maestà would have been very instructive.

What’s often distinctive about Sienese painting is the presence of multiple narratives, set side-by-side. Exhausted by studying too much sacred art in this show, I retired to a nearby sports bar, ordered a drink, and found myself simultaneously watching football on one screen and soccer on another. It’s exciting, I discovered, to watch two or more separate stories unfolding independently at the same time. I wish that this contemporary employment of such multiple narratives was my discovery, but it’s Leo Steinberg’s. In 1967 he wrote, “The next time I have occasion to think about the development of the Italian altarpiece in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” so he said, he would recall the “multiple projections on clustered screens” at the Montreal Expo. Right now it will be interesting to see if contemporary New York narrative painters emulating him will be inspired by this exhibition to create such narratives. Hyman’s book shows how a generation ago, three modern artists, one English (Ken Kiff), one American (R.B. Kitaj) and the third Indian (Bhupen Khakhar), learned from Sienese painting.

What defines a tradition is a succession of artists working in one place who create and develop a shared visual aesthetic. Many Early Renaissance artists did travel, and so brought outside influences into what became their shared style. That said, no one would confuse Duccio’s Sienese paintings from the Florentine works of Giotto or Masaccio. And so it would be most instructive to construct from artworks in the Met comparisons, allowing visitors to see that for themselves. But here I seem to be complaining, urging that more could be done to explicate Sienese painting, when what I really want to say is that this exhibition reveals the Met doing what it does best: offering an in-depth historical presentation of artistic masterpieces that raises fundamental issues.