Siena is known for its medieval paintings,
but here for the first time ever we look at sculptures
from the following period, the so-called Renaissance,
that we always assume we know, but
in fact so little is known about the contribution
of these amazing Sienese artists to that period.
In the first room of the exhibition, we really address bronze
as a material at the intersection between art and artillery.
Whenever you make a statue in Renaissance Italy,
you're making a choice not to make a cannon,
which really tells you a lot about the meaning of these objects.
For the first time ever, all 11 bronze reliefs produced
in Siena in the 15th century are together in one room.
And I think Siena's artists who were working so often
at the intersection between painting and sculpture,
they managed to achieve sometimes extremely painterly qualities
in these bronze reliefs.
In the second room of the show you will find
this amazing tomb by Donatello, it's one of only eight
signed works by Donatello in the entire world.
It's the first time it ever leaves Tuscany in 600 years
and it's this absolute masterpiece
of illusion where Donatello in just an inch or two of bronze
depicts the bishop Giovanni Pecci
as he lay in his bier during his funeral.
If Donatello was compressing the image in one or two inches of bronze,
Vecchietta creates this monument to Mariano Sospini,
one of the star lawyers of his age,
in full relief, really as if the corpse of this man was in front of us.
It's the only monument in bronze with an effigy
of a layman from the Renaissance.
It's really in freestanding sculpture that you see bronze at its best.
You see why artists were so fascinated with this medium.
Because it allows you to achieve impossible poses in other media,
in wood or in marble.
These outstretched limbs would just collapse.
The beauty also of these sculptures,
freestanding, is that they move us around them.
They demand that we circle around them
and as you do that you always experience them from a
different viewpoint
and they become different depending on where you look at them.
Art history to a large extent is a story
and it's a story from which figures like
Francesco di Giorgio or Vecchietta are usually cut out,
but in fact Sienese artists contributed
enormously to the development of the period
that we know of as the Renaissance.
