What a sight it must have been. On June 9, 1311, Duccio’s The Maesta was paraded from his studio to Siena’s cathedral. Bells rang as priests, monks, noblemen, and government officials walked beside it. Citizens held candles in their hands. They were honoring a giant double-sided altarpiece with 53 pictures depicting martyrs, saints, miracles, and poignant scenes from the lives of Mary and Jesus. At the center on one side was a life-size Virgin holding the Child, surrounded by 40 reverent haloed figures. A plaque attached to the work reads “Holy Mother of God, be thou the cause of peace for Siena and life to Duccio because he painted thee thus.”
The Maesta is part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s rapturous Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to commune with art that will likely never be brought together again. Curated by Stephan Wolohojian, the exhibition reunites works that have not been seen together in more than 500 years; some have never traveled outside Italy. How this feat of lending was pulled off might fill a book. In the 18th century, Duccio’s mighty altarpiece was sliced in half, cut into pieces, its panels sold off; now we can gape at the astonishing sight of eight panels of The Maesta brought together from around the globe and installed inches from one another. There are almost 100 works by at least 20 named artists. There are textiles, manuscripts, ivory carvings, stone sculptures, and one shocking wooden head of Christ split open during World War II.
Sienese painting represents a rupture in world art, breaking from Gothic flatness and hieratic Byzantine art. It is more circumspect than Florentine painting, with its stricter proto-perspectival grids and solid minimalistic forms. In Siena, perspective was just part of the mix. Narrative of every kind, from the simultaneous to the sequential, is given tangible space. (As my wife remarked, “Perspective was really bad for painting.”) In Siena a new richness of detail appears, space takes on character, figures fill out, paint becomes fleshy, and color, especially an array of blues, is set free. This explosion of innovation led to Flemish, Dutch, and northern painting. It led, too, to the illuminated manuscript Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry. Yet amid so much revolutionary change, what one feels in the presence of Sienese painting is something restorative and healing.
The Sienese renaissance ended with half of Siena’s population being wiped out by the Black Death in around 1350. None of the city’s four artistic masters — Duccio, Simone Martini, and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti — survived. It took a generation for Sienese artists to reemerge. By then, gossip-biographer Giorgio Vasari had situated Florence, Rome, and Venice as centers of Renaissance art.
You can feel that the center is actually here, in front of The Maesta, where gravity seems to bend. On the right is Mary rising to her feet in palpable architectural space. Her curving body is filled with a terrible foreknowledge of her son’s death. On the left is the archangel Gabriel raising his hand in a gesture of blessing and empathy. His bioluminescent wings seemed to have been caught flapping in this beat between time.
In one panel a man born blind is healed as he is led before Christ. In the same picture we see him happily walking away. In another panel, The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, Christ is portrayed as magisterial and overscale, while Peter and Andrew look up from a boat, dazed, already turning to follow him as disciples. Beneath them, another space opens up with fish caught in a net visible beneath the waves. In a panel depicting the temptation of Christ, an enormous Jesus casts out Satan against a backdrop of seven bejeweled cities. The Transfiguration gives us an almost Abstract Expressionist all-over space, with six standing figures who seem to levitate into the realms of the infinite. This is a complete book of painterly knowledge.
The Virgin Mary was the patron saint of Siena, memorialized by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in his masterpiece fresco in the city. At the Met, his depictions of the life of Saint Nicholas bathe us in expressiveness, insight, and pictorial complexity. In one scene, we witness the murder of a boy. Above, Nicolas and an angel send two beams of light across the painting to the dead boy’s body, and we see the soul of the boy rising up. Here we have dimensionality, tactility, and the beauty and infinitude of being human.
Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple shows Jesus, Mary, and Joseph in Jerusalem, where the 12-year-old Jesus disappeared for three days. Joseph finds the boy in the temple talking to teachers. He brings him home grasping him by his shoulder and presenting him to a worried-sick mother. This is human emotion and suffering wrapped together with psychological insight and sophisticated pictorial solution.
I love Sienese art. When I was 10 years old, my mother left me alone in the Art Institute of Chicago. Like an imprinted baby duck, I was taken by two small panels of Saint John the Baptist. I didn’t know it then, but these were made by Sienese artist Giovanni Di Paolo of the second generation of artists who picked up on what the early Sienese masters had done. I thought, Is everything in this museum trying to tell me something? How can art be this beautiful, mysterious, and clear all at once? The paintings on display at the Met provide the answer.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the angel appearing in one of Duccio’s works.