In the early 1300s, the Tuscan hilltop city of Siena lived through a great period of prosperity, said Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. Its economic, military and political strength provided the conditions for a “rapid artistic transformation”: its painters abandoned “the distant, hieratic grace” of Byzantine-influenced art and concocted a new style, characterised by “dynamism, drama and emotion”.
But, by the 1350s, its “most glorious years” would be “as good as over”. The Black Death “halved” the city’s population and “stripped away its wilder ambitions”. Its chief rival, Florence, emerged as the new superpower, its own art eclipsing Siena’s.
This new “blockbuster” at the National Gallery – featuring more than 100 exhibits including paintings, manuscripts and decorative objects – questions the received wisdom that Florence, not Siena, was “the birthplace of the Renaissance”, said Joanna Moorhead in The Spectator. And convincingly, too. The show is focused mostly on the work of four artists: Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti; Simone Martini; and, “first and foremost”, Duccio di Buoninsegna, a polymath whose “towering legacy would reshape art history”.
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The lighting here is “dark”, the galleries “crypt-like”, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph. Paintings are “dramatically spot-lit” and juxtaposed with some marvellous examples of Sienese sculpture and textiles. It’s the paintings, though, that really thrill. “Exquisite craftsmanship” is a hallmark of Sienese art – gold leaf was used liberally and virtuosically – along with “a newfound interest in the emotional lives of the holy figures being represented”. One Duccio painting here dating from 1290-1300 sees “a sweet yet sorrowful Virgin” tilting her head as “a perky Christ Child tugs at her veil and involuntarily caresses her wrist” with his toes. Another “standout”, by Duccio’s pupil Simone Martini, depicts a “truculent” young Christ “chided by remonstrating parents. Even the son of God, it seems, could get the grumps.” This is an “intense and bewitching” show.
The “emotional power” of these paintings comes from their “mastery of space”, said Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. While we think of perspective as a 15th-century Florentine invention, these artists were already experimenting with space a century earlier, “to create fairy-tale vistas of walled cities, merchant ships and the soaring interiors of gothic cathedrals”. The climax of these innovations is Duccio’s “masterpiece”, the Maestà – a “massive” altarpiece, whose eight panels have been brought together here. You follow the scenes “like a comic strip”, as Jesus “defeats the devil, heals a blind man and raises Lazarus from the dead”. “Visual trickery” gives the impression of “gothic arches and a particoloured pavement” receding “with hypnotic reality”. It is the highlight of an “epochal exhibition about the moment Western art came alive”.
