Exhibition Tour— Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 | Met Exhibitions

We're in one of the most remarkable cities and places of Western Europe in the early years of the 1300s and we have this moment when art just changes in this extraordinary way at this time. It all comes together it seems in a painter's brush and it's one of the most extraordinary things to witness. Siena the rise of painting 1300 to 1350 looks at an extraordinary moment at the beginning of the 14th century in Italy where a group of incredibly ambitious talented and important artists come together to define painting in a new bold way. It looks at the work of four artists in particular Duccio di Boninsegna from Siena, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro Lorenzetti and Ambrogio Lorenzetti distinct artists with a distinct style with a distinct hand that we can identify. Under the guidance of Duccio di Boninsegna Siena developed a special character of painting a poetic vision that expressed itself in many ways and in certain aspects truly defined the practice of painting in the Western tradition for centuries to come. This exhibition brings together a nucleus of works that for centuries had never been seen together before. I have the pleasure of working with Caroline Campbell who at the start of this project was curator of Italian painting at the National Gallery in London and it's this collaboration that has made this exhibition possible. It's difficult for us looking back over 700 years to see sometimes these objects as being radical but that's exactly what they are in a sense the artists of Siena define art for the next few hundred years. The city of Siena is an international city of incredible industry tremendous wealth and tremendous artistic talent. These artists were sponges in many ways of the culture in which they worked. Travelers passing through the city brought with them portable objects, prayer books, ivories, things that we bring together here in the exhibition that certainly sparked these painters to think about their own practice in different ways. But it's an extraordinary moment because in the last years of the 1340s Europe is infested by the Black Death this great plague that was especially present in Italy. So by the end of our story none of these artists survived. We begin our exhibition with one of the great masterworks of the Metropolitan Museum's collection Duccio's small and beguiling Virgin and Child known as the Stocle Madonna. Duccio is looking at a whole history of image making of the Madonna and Child. This was an image that was made legend has it when the Virgin presented herself to the evangelist Saint Luke and she said Luke here I am paint my image. That image was a hard image to mess with and so for centuries the image's authority came through its similarity to its source. Duccio recognizes this but slowly through stylistic change he asks what is my voice in this what is the artist's share in presenting this image. He's one of the most important figures for western painting and indeed I think he's one of the great foundational figures of painting as we know it. He truly recognizes himself as an artist no longer an instrument of Saint Luke no longer part of this very rigid very pre-established tradition. It's one of the most extraordinary things to witness. 700 years later still the energy the vibrancy of Duccio's take on images that could have been seen at a certain point as just rote and stale. But there's nothing stale about this. Nothing it's just alive. It does seem to be alive before our eyes doesn't it and that's not just the color which is dazzling but the light the way the light plays in this and makes it seem as if it's moving before our eyes. We often think wrongly of painting as a two-dimensional object and what these show is that it's got as much life as other forms and is talking so much to it too. Absolutely they're theater. I had the great good fortune of working with Patrick Heron a designer in the Met's design department an architect by training who has worked with me to shape an evocation of Siena and its cathedral with its alternating black and white bands of marble and to make an environment where these extraordinary planes of gold could truly shine. This went through several different iterations to try to find the kind of perfect balance between elements of compression and expansion and in these spaces the columns start to act as a kind of motivator of guiding the visitor through the space revealing things concealing things framing certain vistas that really start to kind of hone in and focus the visitor on different subject matters but also different themes that are resonant in the paintings themselves. Seeing these works come together for the first time is truly amazing and there was no reference point no one has ever seen these before so how do you create a new experience here in the galleries in New York? We didn't need 10 to 12 individual rooms but instead similar to the way that the pieces are both fragment and whole we wanted the architecture to also embody that kind of experience of a fragmented completeness for lack of a better word and what I think the columns help us do is they reorient the visitor as we move through the space but they also completely break apart the idea of what a room is what a gallery is and so as a visitor moves through the space they're seeing multiple sections at the same time they're also seeing different thematic pieces and elements of different types of art which I think as a design structure helps to kind of allow for the visitor to understand the multiple layers of information context and influence that the paintings and the artists were inspired by. So we're standing in front of the back predella of Duccio's Maestà. The Maestà is an enormous double-sided altarpiece which was made for the Cathedral of Siena. It was at the time that it was made the biggest double-sided altarpiece and in fact the first that we know that survived and the predella which is the level at the bottom of the altarpiece is really where narratives are told and here on the back predella we're seeing narratives from the temptation and from the life of Christ and this is the first time that these objects have been brought back together for centuries. We know that the Maestà came off the high altar of the cathedral in the early 16th century. We know that by the 18th century the Maestà had been separated and dismembered and because these little panels are so collectible, are so desirable, they ended up in collections all the way around Europe and America and it's incredible to see them as one sequence working together. It really does take you back to the world of the 14th century painting in a way that nothing else really can. And when you come into this gallery and you are confronted not only with the linearity of the horizontal narrative but also the void above it of the space to remind visitors of how grand and enormous a construction the altarpiece was. I'm fascinated by how interested Duccio is in architecture as well but then he uses the gilded backgrounds to give this sense of divine space as Christ walks through these narratives of his temptation, the wedding at Cana, ending up with the raising of Lazarus, the prefigurement of his own resurrection at the end of the sequence. And these have come from museums in Siena, from Texas, from Washington DC, from Madrid and from London. And here in New York as local as the Frick collection. Exactly. And so lucky were we that our colleagues were willing to let us show them not in their frames but as a unified series. It's one of the reasons why this exhibition is so important because often when we see paintings of this type in museums we see them as individual objects and there might not be anything else like that in that collection. So it's very hard to understand how they fit together and what their context is. So it really is worth an incredible effort like this because you can see how the story continues from one to the other. And that really is something that people have not been able to see for hundreds of years. If you look at the Pieve altarpiece that Pietro Lorenzetti makes in the early 1320s, what's extraordinary about this polyptych is how it allows us to truly understand the materiality of panel painting. So I'm pleased to introduce Alan Miller, panel expert here at the Metropolitan Museum. Alan, it's such a wonderful treat not just to see its painted surface but to understand that this is a built object. This is painting that is actually constructed and not just a canvas that's stretched. Yeah, I think one of the fantastic things about displaying it in the way that we have is that you really get a sense of the materiality of the object in a way that possibly wouldn't be understood if it was pushed up against a wall. One of the things that I find really fascinating is that you get a sense of how the wood was worked. Around the back, along the sides, you see all of the beautiful tooling. You can see punchwork and that can't be done on canvas. The way that the frames are engaged and how they interact with the painting up there with enunciation, that can only be done on panel. Exactly, and it's one of the amazing points of energy in the work that the built structure plays against the fictive structure of the enunciation. There is also an inherent property in wood that allows you to bear weight vertically and so you could actually go quite high, a lot higher than this. And that's one of the many great properties of using wood as a painting support. It allows the artist to mimic the architecture that these were displayed in. Difficult for, I think, many people to imagine that works of this size, of this heft, are fragile, but they are. This exhibition couldn't have happened 25, 30 years ago. Panels just didn't travel then. Now with really great museum controls and working with my colleagues around the world, we can ensure that these rather fragile and delicate panels can travel safely. So we've moved to the artist who really followed Duccio and who took his innovations and experimentation in a whole lot of different ways. And it is remarkable to have two artists, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who are brothers and both, I think, really push the boundaries of paintings in different ways, though they're both exceptional tellers of narratives and of stories. Their interests are so different, are so personal, are so carefully defined. Pietro was certainly in a kind of extension of Rome, working with artists who had direct ties to Rome. And Ambrogio is a completely different kind of painter, an intellectual, someone who is truly trying to grasp the psychological and theoretical nuances of his art. I think you see the psychological depth in his Annunciation because, of course, it is the leap of faith that suddenly God is born from this woman and born through the figure of the Holy Spirit, which we can see in the form of a dove just appearing in front of her halo. It is a rational depiction of a very irrational subject. And the rationalization of space in perhaps one of the earliest attempts at defining a single point perspective in order to play out his narrative. We're looking here at an object that hasn't been together for several hundred years. This is Simone Martini's Orsini Polyptych. It was commissioned for the Cardinal Napoleone Orsini, who you can see just at the bottom here. Remarkable thing to enter into this world, this narrative space that undulates as one moves from left to right, reminding us that unlike the northern tradition of prayer books and devotion in that more intimate way, the Italians, especially Sienese, developed this incredible category of small images for personal devotion. And as you walk around the objects and as you see them in different light, again I'm struck by how carefully the gilding effects create also the sense of greater three-dimensionality, the way in which the halos really stand out, and the way in which those have differently tooled and worked too. Simone is just truly one of the most talented, one of the most extraordinarily elegant painters that ever was, so different from the ambitions of his contemporaries. He's looking at goldsmith work, he's looking at enamel, he's looking at manuscript illumination. I love even now being able to see the sides of these central panels, to see the tooling and the punch work as if they were gold. And then you move to the two central panels and the figure of the Virgin as she recoils into this huge chair. Simone will never abandon that fluid line, that incredible grace and elegance of the Gothic. It reminds us that the art of Siena is this very local, regional style, but it's always one of exchange. And the subsequent impact that these paintings had on French painting is also something we can truly document. Frankly Caroline, I still can't believe we have this here. Simone Martini's image, perhaps of a moment when Christ returns from the temple that is housed in Liverpool, now has been in that museum for over two centuries. To have it here as a culmination to this exhibition, a work that is signed at its base, Simone Martini, and then dated 1342, truly a kind of modern statement of I, Simone, was here painting this at this date and a magical image in so many ways. Absolutely. And a biblical scene, which is totally removed from the biblical circumstances. This does seem to be the moment when Christ disappeared, when he went with his parents to the temple in Jerusalem. Where's the temple? Where's the temple? Exactly. Where are we? Where they are standing on a plain ground. There is the background, the sky is, you know, alluded to by gold. They could be anywhere. So everything is in the drama, in the relationship between these figures. And it is very tempting to try and put feelings into them because she seems to be saying, where have you been? Her husband seems to be saying, what have you done to your mother? And he's saying, well, I've done absolutely nothing at all, and crosses his arms in a sense of truculence. His whole body sort of demonstrates his really not wanting to take part at all. Most extraordinary image of adolescence. And here, I think this is such an amazing moment because it is really one of the moments when Christ, who, you know, if you read the Bible, can sometimes be a difficult figure to identify with because he's God on earth. He's divine. And yet, this is God doing something totally understandable, totally human, and in the way that, you know, most teenage boys actually behave. So you're seeing an incredible realization of Christ's divinity and humanity in this panel. But you're also seeing something which is just told by the power of painting. No gable, no gothic form, truly kind of framed painting the way you could see made today. And then with the psychological tableau, a family scene, truly an extraordinary and fitting end to our narrative. I think this painting shows us also how painting is developing, is changing in so many ways in the period we've been looking at. It's a painting made nearly 700 years ago, but it also has something very new and very modern about it. And that's how I think these paintings talk, this sense of dialogue and engagement, which the artist is encouraging you in. You're not shut out. You're part of the story too.