CHAPTER II.—SIENA
General Works:
Langton Douglas. A History of Siena. New York, 1902.
Ferdinand Schevill. Siena, the Story of a Mediæval Commune, New York, 1909.
Edmund G. Gardiner. The Story of Siena and San Gemignano, London, 1902.
William Heywood and Lucy Olcott. Guide to Siena, History and Art, London, 1903.
Painting, the School.
Emil Jacobsen. Sienesische Meister des Trecento in der Gemälde Galerie zu Siena, Strassburg, 1907; Das Quattrocento in Siena, Strassburg, 1908; Sodoma und das Cinquecento in Siena, Strassburg, 1910; all very valuable for illustrations.
Venturi, Storia dell’ Arte Italiana, Vols. V and VII.
Bernard Berenson, Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance, New York and London, 1909.
C. Ricci, Il Palazzo Pubblico di Siena e la Mostra d’Antica Arte Senese, Bergamo, 1904, offers a good and inexpensive survey of Sienese handicraft in general.
Sienese Pictures in the United States. Consult the illustrated catalogues of the Fogg Museum, Harvard; and of the Jarves Collection, Yale. Also many special articles in Art in America, especially the series in Vol. VIII-IX, by F. Mason Perkins, Some Sienese Paintings in American Collections.
[15]. The fact that the Madonna of the Palazzo Pubblico had been much repainted in Duccio’s time not unnaturally threw Milanesi and other critics off the track. But the date is entirely genuine (see C. & C. [Douglas] Vol. I, p. 162, note 1*; and E. Jacobsen, Das Trecento, p. 18). The latter writes, “The signature and date are genuine. There is no tenable ground for doubting them.”
I have satisfied myself by close inspection that such is the case, and the half dozen or so other panels associated with this Madonna stylistically all seem to belong to the first half of the 13th century.
[16]. Sirén, Burlington Magazine, XXXII (1918) p. 45, ascribes this panel to Cavallini. Berenson in Dedalo, Vol. II, fasc. v, allots it to Constantinople at the end of the 12th century. Neither view is even plausible to me.
[17]. Duccio. A. Lisini, Notizie di Duccio &c. Siena, 1898. Curt Weigelt, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Leipzig, 1911, the standard monograph, well illustrated.
[18]. The whole matter of the Rucellai Madonna is well discussed by Douglas in his edition of C. & C., Vol. I. Appendix to chapter VI. Andreas Aubert, Cimabue, p. 138 ff., and Curt Weigelt, Duccio, both agree that the Rucellai Madonna is the picture called for by the contract of 1285, hence is by Duccio. Aside from many stylistic similarities to Duccio’s early Madonna with Franciscans in the Siena Academy, the exquisitely drawn bare feet of the Angels in the Rucellai Madonna amount almost to a signature for Siena’s greatest painter. H. Thode and O. Sirén hold that a picture designed and begun by Duccio was finished by Cimabue, Toskanische Maler, pp. 308–9, and note 41 to latter page. The hypothesis that Duccio was strongly influenced by Cimabue in this work seems simpler.
[19]. The contract is worth quoting in part from G. Fontana, Due documenti inediti riguardanti Cimabue, Pisa, 1878; it is reprinted in Strzygowski, Cimabue und Rom, Wien, 1888. The papers were recovered from a grocer who was about to use them for wrappers.
“Which picture of the Majesty of Divine and Blessed Virgin Mary and of the Apostles and other saints is to be made in columns and in the predella and [main] spaces of the picture good and pure florin gold shall be used; the other pictures which are to be made in the aforesaid panel above the columns in tabernacles, gables, and frames shall be made ... of good silver gilt.”
The picture apparently was a polyptych of three, five, or seven panels with columns and round arches, with an upper order of gables and tabernacles. It seems to have been the first well-peopled Madonna in Majesty, and it probably served as Duccio’s exemplar. Cimabue died before finishing it, but since in Nov. 1302 he received a large installment of 40 Pisan lire, he must at least have fully drawn the composition on the panel.
[20]. Simone Martini. See the standard work by Raimond van Marle, Simone Martini, Strasbourg, 1920.
There is considerable difference among critics in dating these frescoes, and no objective evidence. The early date, 1322–25, suggested by Venturi and Van Marle, is confirmed by the stylistic character of the work. It lacks the calligraphic, linear formulas which abound in Simone’s works after 1330. The early date also agrees with the general probabilities of the course of events in the decoration of the Lower Church at Assisi.
[21]. Frey’s ed. Berlin, 1886, p. 42.
[22]. The contract for this altar-piece is translated in the illustrations to chapter II, p. 106.
[23]. Venturi, Vol. V, pp. 680–694, offers a sensible compromise view of the authorship of this series, assigning to Pietro himself only the Deposition, Entombment, Stigmatization of St. Francis and a Madonna and Saints, ascribing most of the subjects to an assistant. Dr. Ernest Dewald in a forthcoming Princeton dissertation takes a more skeptical view than Venturi as to Pietro’s presence at Assisi.
[24]. However the “Cecelia Master,” active about 1300, deals ably with such spatial problems. See O. Sirén, Burlington Magazine, Vol. XXXIV, p. 234, and XXXVI, p. 4. and Giotto, plates 11–13, Vol. II.
[25]. Sassetta. Bernard Berenson. A Painter of the Franciscan Legend, (Sassetta), London and New York, 1909.
[26]. Matteo di Giovanni. We have the standard work of G. Hartlaub, Matteo da Siena, Strassburg, 1910. Mr. Berenson in Essays in the Study of Sienese Painting, New York, 1918, essay on Cozzarelli, has made useful criticisms of the list of pictures usually ascribed to Matteo.
[27]. Sodoma. Hobart Cust, Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, usually styled “Sodoma,” New York, 1906.