Four 14th-century Sienese artists who changed painting
Curator Laura Llewellyn sets the scene for a new National Gallery exhibition that is reuniting Sienese works of art from six centuries ago.
A version of this article first appeared in the spring 2025 issue of Art Quarterly, the membership magazine of Art Fund.
Perched amid the vine-covered hills of central Tuscany, the city of Siena today has an off-the-beaten-path feel to it. But in the 13th and 14th centuries, though landlocked and without access to a river, Siena enjoyed a constant traffic of people, and also of things. This was thanks to its pivotal position on the Via Francigena, the ancient pilgrimage route connecting northern Europe to Rome, which passed through the heart of the city.
In the early decades of the 14th century, a pilgrim entering Siena’s walls would have found themselves in a bustling city made rich by banking and commerce. In churches, on the streets, even at the heart of the new government headquarters, they would have encountered images of the Virgin Mary, the city’s supreme protectress and celestial queen.
They would, no doubt, have marvelled at the recently completed cathedral, its vast interior brimming with paintings, sculptures and stained glass, and perhaps sought food and shelter at the adjacent hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. They may even have found time to attend a sermon or to avail themselves of the charitable ministrations of the mendicant (‘begging’) friars, whose great basilicas had been founded in the city over the previous century.
Finally, the more affluent of the visiting pilgrims might have sought out the city’s renowned goldsmiths and painters, commissioning works of art on their journey south and collecting the finished product on their return north.
In addition to opportunities for patronage afforded by the flow of people and goods along the Via Francigena, which was further enhanced by Siena’s direct access to the silk routes, each of the soaring new edifices on the city’s skyline meant myriad commissions for Siena’s leading artists. New spaces and new institutions called not only for new works of art, but new types of art.
And over the first five decades of the 1300s the city’s painters worked, with unprecedented experimentation and ambition, to meet the demand. In doing so, they responded to recent developments in painting and sculpture in their native city and the regions just beyond. But they also looked much further afield, taking inspiration from objects that arrived in the city through its trade networks, such as French Gothic ivory carving or figured silks made on the Iberian peninsula and in Central and Eastern Asia.
In the exhibition at the National Gallery, the resulting pictorial revolutions are explored through the careers of four painters: Duccio di Buoninsegna (d1319), the brothers Pietro (dc1348) and Ambrogio (dc1348) Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini (c1284-1344). This is the first time that such a sizable number of paintings by these towering artists have been brought together.
And to demonstrate the intersection of painting with other art forms, they will be displayed alongside Sienese works in a variety of media (metalwork, enamel, gilded glass, wood, marble, and manuscript illumination) and a selection of works from other countries and cultures (ivories, enamels, illuminated manuscripts, rugs, silks). Overall, visitors will see the pivotal roles these four artists played in pushing the boundaries of painting and, in so doing, defining the Western painterly tradition as we understand it today.
Duccio di Buoninsegna
We begin with Duccio, the oldest of the four, who excelled in the art of panel painting. Visitors to the exhibition will first encounter his so-called Stoclet Madonna, a quietly revolutionary image that upends conventions established over centuries by the most influential icon from Byzantium. The mother and child appear behind an illusionistic marble parapet, which is seen from below, and so occupy a physical space. More arresting still is Duccio’s substitution of a formal front-facing Christ in the act of making a blessing with a child who tenderly interacts with his mother, reaching to tug at her veil, just as a baby might.
Without question the most important project of Duccio’s career was the Maestà (Enthroned Virgin in Majesty), a colossal double-sided altarpiece commissioned by the city and installed on the high altar of Siena Cathedral in 1311. It was a work of breathtaking ambition, whose scale and complex design was never replicated. In its vast cycle of narrative episodes, Duccio made captivating advancements in the art of telling stories with paint, masterfully using architectural frameworks, colour and human gesture for narrative clarity and to show events playing out over time.
Most of the Maestà survives in Siena’s cathedral museum, fragmentary and without its original frame. However, in the 18th century, some parts of it were sold off, and they are now scattered in various museum collections around the world. In the exhibition, for the first time in some 250 years, the eight known panels from the back predella (the base) are reunited. These stand out for their representations of space and dramatic narrative, with events taking place in a range of settings, from cityscapes and domestic interiors to seascapes and rocky wildernesses. They show the painter at his most accomplished.
Whether or not the other three painters who form the focus of this exhibition were active in Duccio’s workshop before or during the creation of the Maestà is a matter of ongoing debate. Certainly, though, Duccio’s achievements provided a training ground for the subsequent generations of painters born in Siena and each of the three absorbed his lessons and took them in new directions.
Pietro Lorenzetti
Pietro Lorenzetti, whose career developed beyond his native city, assimilated many influences as he travelled between his commissions outside Sienese territories: Cortona, Arezzo, Assisi and, later, Florence. Pietro’s art was shaped by his profound interest in sculpture, both that of his contemporaries, especially his compatriot Tino di Camaino, as well as the statuary of classical antiquity.
In the exhibition, with works such as his cut-out crucifix, we can see how this fascination led him to probe, in the medium of paint, the boundary between flatness and three dimensionality. The monumental Tarlati polyptych, which was painted for the Bishop of Arezzo, is a supreme example of the verve and vitality of Pietro’s figures, in all their sculptural fullness. Moreover, Pietro’s narrative paintings made sophisticated advancements on Duccio’s spatial settings, with characters being depicted in evermore complex and logical fictive spaces.
The culmination of these accomplishments is Pietro’s Birth of the Virgin, painted for one of the side altars adjacent to Duccio’s Maestà in Siena Cathedral, where the narrative takes pride of place in the altarpiece’s main panel.
Simone Martini
The trajectory of his near contemporary Simone Martini in some ways provides a foil for Pietro’s career. While Pietro seems not to have gained much of a foothold in the city while Duccio was still alive, Simone was the darling of Siena. His first secure work is the spectacular and prestigious Maestà fresco in the great council chamber of the Palazzo Pubblico.
Besides this major work for the nerve centre of the Sienese government, Simone, like Pietro, worked mostly beyond Siena early on in his career. As well as providing polyptychs for several mendicant foundations across central Italy, he was employed by the Angevins – the Neapolitan branch of the French royal family – in Assisi and Naples. Unlike Pietro, though, Simone returned to Siena following Duccio’s death in 1319 and moved comfortably into Duccio’s slipstream to become the city’s leading painter.
Simone stands out for his subtle portrayal of emotion, his technical brilliance in the tooling and manipulation of gilded surfaces, and his elegant, rhythmical way of painting fabrics. In Siena, together with his brother and brothers-in-law, he ran a prolific painters’ workshop and undertook a slew of civic commissions, most of which are now lost.
One remarkable survival is a group of five panels – reunited for the first time in the exhibition – painted for the Palazzo Pubblico. They depict the Virgin and Child with surrounding saints, each captivating for their understated psychological tenor and surprising detail. Intriguingly too, unlike traditional polyptychs, the panels show no signs of ever having been hinged or nailed together. Instead, Simone seems to have deliberately designed them so that they could be set up in different configurations.
This work – together with the sublime Orsini Polyptych, also brought back together for the first time – underscores Simone’s consummate skill and creativity, not only in conceiving imagery but in developing new types of objects. Indeed, in some cases his works lie so far beyond traditional categories of painted work that their original function or context continues to elude us, as with his Christ Discovered in the Temple, an unusually large independent panel with its rare and arrestingly frank depiction of its subject as a family spat.
Simone spent the final years of his life in Avignon, which for much of the 14th century was the residence of the Pope. We do not know the precise circumstances that led him to close his family business, to leave his home and to establish himself in southern France but his journey north had Sienese precursors, albeit in the form of objects.
Twenty years earlier two exquisitely refined triptychs by Duccio – also reunited in the exhibition for the first time – had been commissioned by a cardinal of Tuscan origin and sent to Avignon. Moreover, Simone’s own Orsini Polyptych may well have proceeded him on the journey north. Perhaps this jewel-like work was the catalyst for his own eventual departure, as news reached him that members of the papal court, beguiled by its emotive power and technical prowess, wished to commission him for works of their own.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Back in Siena, Simone’s departure had left room for the brothers Lorenzetti to take centre stage. Ambrogio was about 15 years his brother Pietro’s junior. In the 1320s, when Simone was monopolising Siena’s civic projects, the brothers worked extensively for the mendicant orders and other religious foundations, at home and further afield. Both, significantly, spent periods working in Florence. The two worked largely independently and ran separate workshops, though they did collaborate on occasion.
In the 1320s they painted together a fresco cycle for the chapter house at the Franciscan convent in Siena, some fragments of which appear in the exhibition. Perhaps their most significant collaboration was a series of now lost frescoes that were executed on the façade of the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, which they produced with Simone. Intriguingly, two panels in the exhibition, one by each brother, suggest their collaboration on a small scale too. They share the same punched decoration, possibly indicating that they once formed a diptych.
If Duccio set in motion new levels of painterly ambition, while Simone was unparalleled for his emotional tenor and refined elegance, and Pietro broke ground in the depiction of logical space and the weightiness of the human body, then Ambrogio elevated painting to an intellectual pursuit. These achievements are the most difficult to represent in an exhibition since his works where the shift from complex narrative to sophisticated allegory is most pronounced are in fresco.
Even so, his accomplishments as allegorical painter are showcased in the exhibition in his beguiling Saint Nicholas panels, where setting and architecture are deployed to dramatic ends. Remarkable too are his two depictions of the Annunciation, both exceptional loans to the exhibition. In one, a vast sinopia (underpainting) for a fresco, Ambrogio plumbs the depths of the Virgin’s confusion and fear, as she clings almost frantically to a slender column. In the other, a painted panel, she is dignified and solemn. Her monumental scale within a pared-back yet spatially complex picture field has no precedent.
The Black Death, which ravaged Europe in the late 1340s, carried off half of Siena’s population, including, very likely, both of the Lorenzetti brothers. Simone had died in Avignon just a few years previously. Nevertheless, these four painters lived on in the works that survived them, and their impact on artists and theorists in succeeding centuries was inestimable. Their reach went far beyond their native city. Indeed, thanks to many prestigious commissions throughout central Italy, for the Angevin kings of Naples, and the Papal Court in Avignon, Sienese painting, distinctively local and at the same time unquestionably international, came to be admired and emulated across Europe.
‘Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350’, 8 March to 22 June, National Gallery, London. 50% off paid exhibitions with National Art Pass.
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