A history of Italian painting

by Frank Jewett Mather

ILLUSTRATIONS FOR CHAPTER I

On the Dignity and Wealth of Old Florence

Giovanni Villani, Historie, XII, 4, regrets the passing of decorum with the advent of the French and the Duke of Athens in 1342, but wealth increased.

“Formerly the clothing and costumes [of the Florentines] was the most beautiful, noble and distinguished of any nation, in the manner of the togaed Romans.” Evidently the look of things favored the art of a Giotto.

In book XI, ch. 91–93, Villani gives remarkable and quite modern statistics which I paraphrase and quote, in part from the Giunta edition, Venice, 1559. The time is about 1340.

“We found by diligence that in these times there were in Florence 25,000 men fit to bear arms, from 15 to 70 years old, among whom there were 1506 nobles.... There were then in Florence 65 fully equipped knights, though before the middle class which now rules was organized, there were more than 250 knights.... There was estimated to be 90,000 ... men, women and children in the city. There is supposed to be generally in the city 1,500 foreigners, travellers, and soldiers not counting in the population the clergy, monks, and nuns.... In the outlying districts are supposed to be 80,000 people. We have found from the rector who baptizes the children (since for every male who was baptized in San Giovanni—in order to have the count—was dropped a black bean, and for every female a white) that for every year in these times there were from 5,800 to 6,000, the males generally exceeding by 300 to 500 a year.

“We find that the boys and girls at [primary] school were from 8,000 to 10,000. The boys who study the abacus (calculation) and arabic numbers, in six schools, from 1,000 to 1,200. And those who are learning [Latin] grammar and logic, in four great schools, from 550 to 600.

“The churches, which were then in Florence and in the suburbs, counting the abbeys, and monastic churches, we find to be 110, of which 57, parish churches ... 5 abbeys and two priories with 80 monks, 24 convents of nuns, with more than 500 women, 10 friaries with more than 700 friars, 30 hospitals with more than 1000 beds to lodge the poor and infirm, and from 250 to 300 chaplain priests.

“The shops of the cloth makers (arte della lana) were 200 and more, and they made from 70,000 to 80,000 bolts, at a value of more than 1,200,000 gold florins, although fully a third part staid in the city for the workers, without gain for the cloth handlers, and the workers are more than 30,000 persons....

“The warehouses of the art of the Calimala, for the French and transalpine cloth, were 20, which brought in per year more than 10,000 bolts of a value of 300,000 gold florins, all of which was sold in Florence....

Banks of money changers 80.... Shops of bootmakers ... 300. The college of judges, from 80 to 100. And notaries from 600 up, doctors of physic and surgery 60, and druggists’ shops 100....

“The greater part of the well-to-do, rich, and noble citizens with their families, staid in the country for four months, and some, more, a year.”...

“Other dignities and magnificences of our city of Florence I should not fail to bring to memory, for information of such as shall come after us. It was, within, well built with many beautiful palaces and houses, and in these times they were continually demolishing, thus bettering the building by making it more comfortable and rich, bringing in from outside the examples for every sort of betterment and beauty. Churches, cathedrals, friaries of every rule, monasteries, magnificent and rich. Furthermore, there was no citizen who did not have a country place, great or small, which was not richly built, indeed far greater buildings than in the city; and every citizen sinned by inordinate spending, whence they were thought crazy. But it was so magnificent a thing to see, that a foreigner, not used to coming in, believed, because of the rich structures for three miles about, that it was all one city after the manner of Rome, not to mention the rich palaces, towers, court yards, terraced gardens, still further from the city, which in any other country would have been called the rural districts. In short one would have thought that within six miles of the city were more rich and noble inhabitants, than, taking them together, two Florences could have produced. And let this suffice for telling of the facts of Florence.”

Giotto’s View of Franciscan Poverty

Giotto’s humanistic detachment from the Franciscan doctrine of voluntary poverty is well illustrated in his poem which is quoted in part from Dante Gabriel Rosetti’s translation. The original is in G. Milanesis’ edition of Vasari, Le Vite, Vol. I, Florence 1878, pp. 426–8.

“Many there are, praisers of Poverty;

The which as man’s best state is register’d

When by free choice preferr’d,

With strict observance, having nothing here.

For this they find certain authority

Wrought of an over-nice interpreting.

Now as concerns such thing,

A hard extreme to me it doth appear,

Which to commend I fear,

For seldom are extremes without some vice,

Let every edifice,

Of work or word, secure foundation find;

Against the potent wind,

And all things perilous, so well prepared—

That it needs no correction afterward.”

A Contract with Orcagna for the Altar-Piece of 1357

Tommaso di Rossello Strozzi left a rough note of the terms of the contract for the altar-piece of his chapel. Doubtless the actual contract was much fuller. The minute is published by Filippo Baldinucci, Opere, Milano 1811, Vol IV. p. 397.

“Herewith is to be written [on my part] and Andrea called Orcagna that I Tommaso di Rossello aforesaid have given to paint for the altar-piece which is made for the altar of [the chapel] in Santa Maria Novella, of a breadth of five braccia, 1 sol. [over 10 feet] there or thereabouts. The aforesaid Andrea is to paint in fine and splendid colors; and gold, silver and everything else are truly to be used in the entire panel and pinnacles, that is [gold] leaf. Only in the side columns may silver be used.... And [with] as many figures as [directed] by me Tommaso it shall be completed. And the said panel to be entirely painted by his own hand.

“[^[1]] 354 in twenty months....

“Should it come about that the aforesaid Andrea should not give it to us completed and painted.”

“He should pay me for every additional week that he works at the painting as it shall seem right to the judgment of the here named arbitrators.”...

“Should it come to more than the aforesaid price, we will take the judgment of Carlo, Paolo and Fra Jacopo.”

Such is approximately the sense of this very difficult and quite grammarless annotation of Tommaso Strozzi. The arbitrators must have had occasion to act, for the panel is dated 1357, two years after the promised time.

Fig. 33. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna of San Francesco.

Chapter II
SIENA AND THE CONTINUING OF THE MEDIÆVAL STYLE

On the Romantic instability of Siena—Fidelity to Byzantine Ideals—Guido, Coppo, the Master of the Altar-front of St. Peter—Duccio and his great Majesty of the Madonna—His twofold tendency: to elaborated staged narrative; to sparse and exquisite decoration—Simone Martini and the Idealistic chivalric style—The Brothers Lorenzetti and the popular panoramic style—Second half of the Fourteenth Century—The Fifteenth Century: Sassetta and Giovanni de Paolo—Matteo, Benvenuto and Neroccio—The Renaissance and the downfall of the School, Francesco di Giorgio, Sodoma.

As you enter Siena by the wide Camollia gate you will read in Latin “Siena opens her Heart still wider to thee”:—Cor magis tibi Sena pandit. Thus Siena avows herself the city of the heart. Where Florence studied and calculated, she mused and dreamed; where Florence was solid, she was volatile. For unrewarding idealisms she had a kind of genius. Long after the other Italian communes had seen it was worst possible business to support the emperor, Siena was faithful to that lost cause. Every few years she changed her form of government, and seldom for the better. Merrymaking and pageantry were universal in old Italy, but Siena alone had a Spendthrift Club (Brigata Spendereccia) devoted to continual pleasure, and a poet, Folgore da San Gemignano, to celebrate its gaieties. Siena was ardent in inconstant fashion. Early in the 14th century was found a nude marble Venus so beautiful that it was set up in the great square and thronged with admirers. Then the war with Florence went badly, and at a few words from a pious fanatic, the citizenry smashed up the image and secretly buried the bits on Florentine soil to bring bad luck to the foe. Naturally no bad luck ensued to Florence, but Siena had enjoyed two delightful emotional crises. You will see why Siena never could produce a realistic art, any more than Ireland has produced one. Her eye was not on the object but on her own state of mind. Thus Florence will produce historians, scientists, and politicians, while Siena will produce saints and miracles.

Amid this romantic inconstancy, the continuing thread was the cult of the Blessed Virgin. No other city thought so delicately of her, and no other art has represented her so ideally. Had she not saved the city? In 1259 the Florentine Guelfs and their allies marched with overwhelming force to the very gates of Siena. Ruin was imminent and despair abroad, when by a common impulse the populace marched penitently to the Cathedral and before the rude picture of the Queen of Heaven solemnly committed the city into her hands. In ecstacy of renewed faith the inferior army of Siena fell upon the invaders at Montaperti and utterly routed them. In gratitude Siena remained the city of the Virgin. When in 1310 the painter Duccio replaced the rude effigy of the Madonna of Victory with one of the finest Madonnas known to art, Fig. [37], the whole city suspended business and escorted the picture from the studio to the Cathedral with hymns and litanies in honor of their divine patroness.

Nowhere else has painting paid such homage to the Virgin Mary. In other cities it was enough to represent her enthroned with a handful of angels or saints in attendance. The Sienese painters multiplied the celestial escort until it became a heavenly court over which the Mother of God presides in sweet majesty. Siena also grasped at the then not quite orthodox subject of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven. You see her slender form rising amid a glory of angels more than a hundred years before the theme was common elsewhere.

These brief hints will tell of the temper of Siena. You will not expect such a city to be like Florence, interested in facts and charmed by the human spectacle. She will be rather engrossed with the beauty of old legends and in rare forward-looking moments concerned with her own devout imaginings. She will not wish the saints to be like the people one knows, but like denizens of some divine, far-off fairyland. Her painting will not be humanistic but of an unworldly idealism.

Fig. 34. Guido of Siena. Madonna.—Uffizi.

Such being the temper of Siena, her artists, unlike those of Florence, had no quarrel with the Byzantine style. Its splendid irreality only needed to be made flexible and gracious. Siena has really no new ideas to express, merely feelings more tender and exquisite. Her pictorial reforms are reverent and gradual, backward-looking, mediæval. Her art from 1300 to 1500, as lovely within its narrow limits as the closed garden of the Virgin, has the great interest of teaching us what capacities for growth lay in the mediæval tradition itself—what painting in Italy would have been had Siena exercised her temporary might after Montaperti and razed Florence five years before Giotto was born.

Fig. 35. Sienese about 1275. Altar-front of St. Peter.—Siena.

A little earlier than the year 1225, when Florence called in strangers to adorn the Baptistery with mosaics in the Greek style, Guido of Siena signed and dated 1221 the most famous of his madonnas. Unhappily the enthroned Virgin of the Palazzo Pubblico was repainted some fifty years later, a fact which has led many critics unnecessarily to doubt the date.[^[15]] But from half a dozen other pictures by Guido we may learn that he was a diligent and rather heavy-handed imitator of the current Greek formulas, Figure [34]. At the battle of Montaperti the Sienese captured an excellent Florentine painter, Coppo di Marcovaldo, and in 1261 he painted the admirable madonna which is still in the church of the Servi. It shows a sensitive use of the Byzantine conventions. There is pensiveness and almost shyness in the face and posture of the Virgin, and loving intentness in that of the Child. Their relation is to each other and not as in earlier madonnas to the devout public. These intimate qualities have been ascribed, I think wrongly, to restoration. But they appear even more emphatically in the entirely unrestored Madonna, Figure [3], in the collection of Mr. Otto Kahn, which I think may be a Coppo[^[16]], and is in any case of similar date and feeling.

The same process of sweetening the old style while accepting it, is shown in the famous altar-piece of St. Peter in the Academy at Siena, Figure [35]. The gaunt figure of the Saint is completely traditional, the little stories of the Annunciation and Nativity at the side show a new vivacity and a new grace. Siena met the innovating painter more than half way, for the indignant citizens soon marred with their knives the crucifiers of the head of the Christian Church. The date of the panel will not be far from 1275, and already the painter of genius who was to create the sweet, new style was learning his trade.

Fig. 36. Duccio Purcellai Madonna.—Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

Of Duccio di Buoninsegna, the father of the Sienese school, and everything considered its greatest master, we have numerous records,[^[17]] and by no means all to his credit. He must have had the artistic temperament in a degree then unusual. The court records show half a dozen fines against him, and he was not scrupulous about paying his debts. One forgets these foibles before those Madonnas which are a consummate expression of taste and those narratives which are a triumph of tact and ingenuity. Duccio’s mind does not grasp the harsher and more heroic emotions, but within the realm of the tender and pathetic he is supreme. His elegance appears in his first important work, the famous Rucellai Madonna, Figure [36], in Santa Maria Novella at Florence, which tradition erroneously ascribes to Cimabue. It is presumably the great panel which Duccio contracted to paint in 1285.[^[18]] He was probably young and unconsidered, for he took all the risks, agreeing that the picture might be rejected at the will of the patrons. The Society of Saint Mary the Virgin would have been foolish indeed to reject the most gracious Madonna the world had then seen. Characteristic of Duccio are the swaying curves of the contours and especially of the draperies, the thin, delicately folded robes of the Child and the attendant angels and the sensitively drawn bare feet. Working in Florence and doubtless impressed by Cimabue, Duccio has retained in this early work a certain austerity which gives way in his later work to a more feminine sweetness. For that very reason the Rucellai Madonna is perhaps the greatest Madonna of the century, since without loss of the stately Byzantine qualities, she gains the new attributes of grace. It was no wonder that when the name of Duccio had faded out of the Florentine memory, Florence ascribed this noble Madonna to the venerated founder of her native school, Cimabue. Recent criticism has righted the unconscious wrong thus done to Siena.

Fig. 37. Duccio. Madonna in Majesty.—Opera del Duomo, Siena.

To mature his style Duccio needed only to intensify the qualities of sweetness and grace which are evident already in the Rucellai Madonna. The stages of his growth are represented in minor works at Siena and in British and Roman collections. But his fame, for the layman, is associated with the magnificent altar-piece which he executed for the Cathedral of Siena, and only the special student need look beyond it. On the 9th of October, 1309, Duccio contracted with the trustees of the Cathedral to do a great altar-piece wholly with his own hands, at the rate of sixteen soldi a day and expenses. He promised to take no other work during the painting. It was finished in June of 1311 and carried in solemn procession from the bottega outside the Porta a Stalloreggi to the Cathedral. A chronicler describes the cortege “parading about the Campo, as is usual, all the bells pealing a glory in devotion for so noble a picture as this is.... And all that day they kept praying with many alms which were given to poor folk, praying to God and His Mother, who is our advocate, that she defend us in her infinite mercy from every adversity and every ill, and save us from the hands of traitors and foes of Siena.” Most characteristic of the febrile patriotism of Siena is this constant dread of the traitor.

About a year before this ceremony the trustees enlarged the scheme for the picture, making an additional contract for thirty-eight stories to be paid at the rate of two florins and a half each. These were put on the back of the altar-piece, covering very fully the life of Christ and that of the Virgin. Thus the front of the altar-piece represents the decorative and monumental ideals of Sienese painting while the back exemplifies its feeling for narrative. Everything that Sienese painting was to be is already in germ in this marvellous work.

In depicting the Virgin “in Majesty,” Figure [37], Duccio has magnified the theme. Earlier pictures show only a handful of angels in attendance. Here we have a cloud of celestial witnesses, the four patrons of Siena kneeling in the foreground, at the sides charming alternation of grim, bearded evangelists, orientally soft girl martyrs, and youthful archangels. Seven years earlier Cimabue had conceived a similar great Majesty for the Church of Santa Chiara at Pisa.[^[19]] Doubtless Duccio had seen it, and, though it is lost to us, we may assume, that the Sienese artist outdid his prototype both in sweetness and splendor.

In many ways Duccio’s Majesty is highly traditional. It shows the Byzantine horror of voids, is a little crowded. But this defect would be less apparent if it were raised on its historiated base (predella) with its original pinnacles above. Everything derives from Byzantine exemplars, reverently improved in a realistic direction. Duccio has dared to paint the Christ as a laddie; and not as a little old man; he has shown the soft forms of His body through light draperies; he has kept the austerity of the Byzantine apostles but has attenuated their harshness; he has worked the insipid female masks of the older art into forms of a positive and dreamy grace. One feels the tender mood of the work in the Latin jingle at the foot of the throne, typical of dozens of similar dedications in Siena:

Mater Sancta Dei

Sis caussa Senis requei

Sis Duccio vita

Te quia pinxit ita

which I may rudely paraphrase:

Holy Mother of God: grant Siena rest,

Grant life to Duccio,—he did his best.

All the sensibility of the City of the Virgin is in these prattling rhymes with which they loved to hallow and offer great pictures.

Fig. 38. Duccio. Entry into Jerusalem; Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet; Last Supper. From the back of the great Madonna.—Opera del Duomo, Siena.

If the front of this panel shows only moderate innovations, the case is not so for the back. The two score stories from the Bible or early Christian legend, in the distribution of the figures follow faithfully the standard Italo-Byzantine compositions. Where Duccio steps in is in bettering the forms, giving grace to the draperies, and animation to the gestures—above all in providing contemporary architectural accessories, and coping with the problem of space. He also carries to their ultimate refinement certain decorative formulas which the Byzantine painters had glimpsed but not fully realized. Thus two quite opposed tendencies pass into Sienese painting from Duccio;—a rather small preoccupation with accessories and the problem of space, and a pure æstheticism concerned with finesses of decorative arrangement—in short, the prose and the poetry of Sienese painting.

Sienese narrative painting tends to be scrupulous about details and inscenation, quite as a good story-teller naturally provides incidents that make for plausibility. We may see how Duccio’s mind works in the familiar theme of Christ entering Jerusalem, Figure [38]. Duccio sets the spectator in a garden with an open gate, thus throwing the scene back a little. Above the procession and the rejoicing throng rises a city wall, and still higher against the sky bristle Gothic towers and spires. Thus the theme gains picturesqueness and variety. One forgets that there is hardly space for the welcoming throng before the gate, and that the donkey’s four feet are on a level although he is going up hill. These little maladjustments show that while Duccio took infinite pains in inventing the setting, he borrowed the figure groups bodily from earlier Byzantine compositions in which the setting was simpler. In this piecing-together process he turns some pretty sharp corners, but he never sacrifices clarity and expressiveness.

In the scene where the maid servant catches the Galilean burr in Peter’s voice, Figure [39], and asks if he be not a follower of Jesus, we find Duccio’s method quite at its best. Nothing could be better than the sudden turn of the girl with one foot on the steps. Fine, too, is the concentration of the crowd on the exciting problem of gossip. Well-observed, their actions as they warm their feet and hands at the fire. Vivid, too, the impulsive gesture of Peter as he denies the charge. The place, a court yard with a staircase leading right into the picture above, which represents the court room where Jesus is being questioned, is most elaborately planned. One looks back through a portal into farther spaces. All this was so new and interesting that I presume the Sienese have never noticed to this day that the seated group would never fit in the space assigned to it and that the positions of the figures are ambiguous. The picture does admirably its work of telling a story spiritedly, and that is enough.

Fig. 39. Duccio. Peter denies Christ.—Opera del Duomo, Siena.

Duccio’s Calvary, Figure [41], is remarkable for breadth, spectacular effectiveness, and a measured pathos. As usual he multiplies actors and incidents while keeping the orderliness of the arrangement. The slightness of all the forms, their little weight and uncertain balance are apparent. And there is, on the same principle of taste, a similar attenuation of emotion. Where Giotto at Padua gave stark tragedy, Duccio offers a gentle flutter of restrained grief.

Fig. 40. Duccio. The Marys at the Tomb.—Opera del Duomo.

Such is the average of these narratives, clear, picturesque, circumstantial, infused with a generalized and never very intense emotion. There are some, mostly composed with few figures, which reveal a great fastidiousness of arrangement. In such a composition as the Marys at the Tomb, Figure [40], Duccio reveals himself as pure æsthete, as consummate master of linear composition. The motive is essentially insignificant, merely that the Marys shrunk at the sight of the angel at the tomb, but out of that motive of withdrawal is wrought through the little panel a lovely rhythm to which everything contributes—the rise of the cliffs and their crinkly edges, the contrasting angles of the tomb and its impossibly tilted lid, the reciprocal curve of the angel. We grasp in the picture a general truth which reaches far beyond Duccio and Siena, that a too conscious struggle for style precludes any complete expression of emotional significance. For this picture is as trivial as a narrative as it is exquisite as a decoration.

Fig. 41. Duccio. Calvary.—Opera del Duomo.

Duccio, who disappears from our sight about the year 1318, fixed once for all the character of the Sienese school. In narrative it was to adopt the placid and tender tone of legend, most unlike the urgent and dramatic mood of Giotto. The Sienese artist was too reverent to raise the question how did this happen, and how did the persons feel; he asked rather “How do we feel about it as believers?” The beauty of the work, then, is not that of outer reality but of revery and meditation. It never has the tang and variety of good Florentine narrative painting, but within its lovingly modulated monotony, Sienese narrative painting is supremely charming.

Fig. 42. Simone Martini. Madonna in Majesty. Fresco.—Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

Duccio also started in Siena a somewhat worried and petty concern with accessories, architecture, complications of perspective. He inaugurated a tradition of material splendor in gilding, tooling, delicate graduation of color which remained the glory of Sienese painting for nearly two centuries. So far as we know he painted only in tempera on panel, and the Sienese generally were to triumph in this feminine form of work rather than in the masculine methods of fresco. Finally Duccio took over from Byzantine art and perfected certain finesses of highly simplified and abstract composition, a pure æstheticism distinctly Sienese and wholly alien to the warm humanism of Florence. You will find this austerely lovely style at its best in Simone Martini, and surviving as late as Sassetta and the middle of the fifteenth century.

After Duccio, Sienese painting divides itself into two tendencies, one aristocratic, chivalric and æsthetic, deriving from his decorative manner; the other popular, narrative and realistic, deriving from his minutely staged scenes on the back of the great altar-piece. Of the aristocratic style Simone Martini is the greatest exemplar, of the popular style, the brothers Lorenzetti.

Simone Martini was born in 1283 or thereabouts. We first meet him as an artist in the great frescoed Majesty of the Virgin, Figure [42], completed in 1315 for the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. The arrangement is like that of Duccio’s Majesty, finished only five years earlier, and the facial types are generally those of Duccio. But the great fresco gains clarity and impressiveness from the added space, from the picturesque motive of a canopy, from the isolation and elevation of the Madonna above her escort, and from the rich Gothic forms of the throne, which are a novelty in painting. While most of the faces show the orientalism of Duccio, the Madonna has the level-browed, intent character of Gothic art, and the Child is realistic. Gothic again is the graceful border with its fine medallions, and the bright colors of the whole. It is the most splendid enthroned Virgin in the world, and she is conceived chivalrically as a sort of tournament queen with her paladins upholding a canopy, and angel pages on their knees offering roses and lilies.

To the Sienese this was a political picture, as a rhymed inscription in Italian shows. The saintly patrons of Siena address the Virgin:

“Angelic flowers, roses and lilies

With which the heavenly meadow is adorned,

Delight me less than do good counsels.

But sometimes I see such as verily

Despise me and my city betray,

And gain praise the more for evil words,

With such as merit condemnation.”

The Virgin answers the saints patrons somewhat evasively:

“Fix my delights in your minds,

So that I shall, as ye wish,

Fulfil your honorable requests.

But if the powerful molest the weak,

Oppressing whether with shame or harm—

Let not your prayers be made for these

Nor for whomsoever betrays my city.”

Fig. 43. Simone Martini. St. Martin Knighted.—Lower Church, Assisi.

In Simone’s work this great Majesty is an exception. He preferred generally to work on a more restricted scale, to burn the lamp of æsthetic sacrifice. I can merely allude to the great idealized portrait of St. Louis of Toulouse, in S. Lorenzo, Naples. It was painted for King Robert of Anjou, whose kneeling figure appears in the picture, sometime after 1317. The thing is resplendent in gold and azure, adorned by curiously twisted Gothic borders; in sentiment it is impassive as a Buddhist painting.

Fig. 44. Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi. The Annunciation.—Uffizi.

About the year 1325,[^[20]] we may surmise, Simone was called to Assisi to fresco the Chapel of St. Martin in the Lower Church. He set upon the walls so many fairy tales, tender and sprightly in sentiment, provided with the few essential accessories that a rapid story-teller would need. What more charming than the boy Martin praying while they bind on him the equipment of a knight, Figure [43], and musicians sound a fanfare! What more gallant than the lad setting out on crusade against the Teutons who lurk in a cleft of the background! This gracious childlike quality, quite akin to the tender phase of Duccio, is exceptional in Simone, who habitually is the strenuous decorator.

His sparse and austere methods appear clearly in the commemorative fresco of Guidoriccio, hired general of Siena, and conqueror of Sassoforte. It is in the Palazzo Pubblico and duly dated 1328. Nothing is realistic but the horse and rider. They are isolated, hold alone a field made up of pure symbols for camps, and fortresses and craggy hill-tops, yet the martial effect is unmistakable and the composition most quaintly impressive.

The quintessence of Simone’s later art is in the famous Annunciation of the Uffizi, Figure [44]. In order to justify the most nervously exquisite of linear arrangements he has chosen the least significant moment of the event. His Virgin is merely a sullen princess resenting an intrusion; the Gabriel, an etherialized courtier pleading a cause with apologies. But the contrast of the advancing and shrinking motives gave Simone precisely what he wanted. He builds up areas richly colored or brocaded, bounded by sharp curves, relieved by flutters and spirals of flying drapery, and accentuated by such details as the olive twigs and the lily which have the crisp incisiveness of finest metal work. As a triumph of pure decoration Gothic painting has nothing better to show than this lovely panel which was finished in 1333 for the chapel of Sant’ Ansano at Siena. It has little quality of heart in it, and no reverence save that of consummate workmanship.

Great honors awaited Simone. He was called to the exiled papal court at Avignon in 1339, met Petrarch, painted Petrarch’s Laura and is lauded in one of the poet’s sonnets. Of Simone’s work at Avignon we have only a few small panels scattered between Antwerp, Paris, Liverpool, and Berlin. The compositions, most of which belonged to a composite altar-piece depicting Christ’s passion, waver between his old simple style and a crowded and animated mood reminiscent of Duccio, and influenced by the Lorenzetti. Simone is unable to resist the universal tendency towards diffuse narrative, and in so far as he yields to it, he is less than himself. Christ Bearing His Cross, in the Louvre, exemplifies the extravagance and morbidness of this latest manner, Figure [45]. His strength lies in sacrifice and abstraction, his real affinities are the contemporary Buddhist painters of China and Japan, though of course he knew nothing of them. He died in 1344, leaving behind him a tradition of fastidious artistry which was potent in Siena for over a century.

Fig. 45. Simone Martini. Christ bearing His Cross.—Louvre.

As late as 1450, Lorenzo Ghiberti informs us in his “Commentaries,”[^[21]] the Sienese regarded Simone Martini as their greatest painter. He differed from them, preferring, himself, Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This was an eminently Florentine choice, Ambrogio’s warmth, concreteness, and elaboration were on the whole Florentine. He worked for several years at Florence, must have known Giotto, certainly studied him with discerning admiration. With his elder brother, Pietro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti gave to Duccio’s tradition of detailed narrative painting its perfected form. They were great fresco painters, and most characteristic as such. In panel painting they are less original, but they bring into this highly conventional art a great ardor and curiosity. They represent the popular average of Siena as Simone Martini represented its aristocratic minority.

Fig. 46. Pietro Lorenzetti. Madonna with Saints, 1320.—Pieve, Arezzo.

We first meet Pietro Lorenzetti as an artist in the altar-back at the Pieve, Arezzo,[^[22]] Figure [46], which was finished in 1320. It is an ancona, or compartmented piece and the most splendid that has come down in Romanesque form. The figures are of two sorts. The Madonna is of intent Gothic type, and the fine motive of holding off the Christchild at elbow length in order to see him better is borrowed from Giovanni Pisano, who in turn took it from French Gothic sculpture. So are the forms above in the Annunciation new and graceful, while the little boxed room with its plastic column is also novel. The Assumption of the Madonna in the highest pinnacle is probably the earliest occurrence of this famous Sienese theme in painting. But all the figures of saints in the three orders of the side panels are taken almost without change from Duccio’s great altar-piece. It would be interesting to trace Pietro’s emancipation through a dozen panels. No one better combined dignity with grace, and feeling, and splendor. His work in fresco is fragmentary and confused with that of his younger brother. We are certain of nothing except a fragment of a deeply felt Calvary in the Church of St. Francesco, at Siena. Many critics ascribe to him the agitated and wildly picturesque frescoes of the Passion in the left transept of the Lower Church at Assisi.[^[23]] But this, I think, is a mistake. Pietro is never in his certain works so lively and indecorous and casual. We have to do with an artist influenced by Duccio working about 1330, Pietro himself may appear as the Stigmatization, Figure [47], and one or two of the other simpler compositions. The other frescoes are chiefly interesting as showing the dangers of the panoramic method of Siena. Take the Last Supper, Figure [48]. The theme is simply lost in the fantastic richness of the accessories. It is hard to find Christ or Judas, for the eye seeks the radiating rafters or the scullery where cats lurk and eager scullions wipe the dishes.

Fig. 47. Pietro Lorenzetti, or Follower. St. Francis receiving the Stigmata. Fresco.—Lower Church, Assisi.

Fig. 48. School of Pietro Lorenzetti. The Last Supper. Fresco.—Lower Church, Assisi.

In the Birth of the Virgin, dated 1342, Figure [49], Pietro spoils a carefully studied and well-felt picture by elaboration of the setting. The frame is conceived as the plastic front of a Gothic room within and behind which, spaces are multiplied confusingly. Here the pedantic preoccupation with the problem of space offends the eye and destroys the unity of what in a simpler setting would be a monumental composition. It illustrates the dangers of that smaller realism which from Duccio down afflicted the more progressive painters of Siena. Such a picture enables us to appreciate the tact and thoughtfulness with which Ambrogio Lorenzetti approached his narrative themes.

Fig. 49. Pietro Lorenzetti. Birth of the Virgin.—Opera del Duomo, Siena.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti was born about the beginning of the century. In 1331 and later he painted remarkable frescoes for the Church of St. Francis. These if complete would afford the most interesting comparisons with Giotto at Florence, but the two that remain are among the best narrative paintings of the time. What will first strike the observer in the story of St. Louis of Toulouse renouncing his throne as he takes the Franciscan vow, Figure [50], is the variety and orderliness of the emotions. The devotion of the saint is well offset by the intense, melancholy curiosity of his brother Robert, who becomes king through the sacrifice. The audience is divided into admiring Franciscans and idly marveling courtiers, the whole well dominated by the kindly and reverend figure of the Pope. Remarkable is the methodical division of the spaces. A slender column establishes the picture plane and sets the figures back. A sort of desk in a hollow square defines and isolates the monastic group, while the courtiers have their appropriate location in a third plane of alcoves. Florence has next to nothing of this sort at this period, and it may be noted that this careful division of spaces is not matter of display and curiosity as in Duccio, but is logical and effective as regards the persons of the narrative.

Fig. 50. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Prince Louis of Toulouse receives the Franciscan Vow.—San Francesco, Siena.

Of similar significance, but more dramatic and picturesque, is the martyrdom of the Franciscan missionaries before the Sultan of Morocco. The elaborated spaces make for clarity, the entirely professional and impersonal cruelty of the Moorish tyrant and his bodyguard is splendidly caught and effectively contrasted with the courageous submission of the martyrs. Lorenzo Ghiberti praises the energy and character of this work, and the observer of today feels as deeply its romantic appeal. All the figures are set on receding platforms, the problem of space is solved along lines of intelligent literalism.[^[24]]

Fig. 51. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Madonna in Majesty.—Massa Marittima.

It would be a pleasure to dwell on the Madonnas of Ambrogio. The tragic Madonna of S. Francesco, Figure [33], the Madonna with St. Dorothy and St. Lucy, in the Siena Academy, the Virgin in Mr. Dan Fellowes Platt’s collection are among the best. No other early Italian so combined nobility with motherly warmth. His splendor and sweet dignity may best be felt in the Majesty of the Virgin, Figure [51], in the little town of Massa Marittima. The central motive, Mary and the Child embracing, is almost Ambrogio’s invention. He rings the changes on it in lovely modulations, while always retaining monumentality. This picture is as stately as Duccio’s Majesty, and as resplendent as Simone Martini’s, while having qualities of ardor and fancifulness all its own. The fairy-like Virtues on the steps of the Madonna’s throne especially show the rich vein of pure fantasy which accompanied Ambrogio’s robustness. The picture may be dated about 1336 or later.

Previous to its painting Ambrogio had passed some years at Florence, where he must have studied and known Giotto, and where he himself influenced powerfully the beginnings of the new panoramic style. Whatever frescoes he himself did there have perished, and the only memorials of his visit are certain delightful little panels telling with vivacity and utmost circumstantiality the legends of St. Nicholas. At Florence he must have analyzed Giotto’s great political frescoes, now lost, which depicted in symbols good and bad government. These were surely the inspiration for the political symbols and illustrations which Ambrogio, in the year 1337 and later, painted in the great hall of the Palazzo Pubblico at Siena.

The most famous is the Allegory of the State. The Commune sits enthroned, above in the air are the theological virtues—Faith, Hope and Charity; seated at the side are the four secular virtues—Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude—and with them two additional personifications useful to a state—Magnanimity and Peace. The graceful relaxed figure of Peace, Figure [52], with her filmy drapery is famous. Below the platform on which the Commune sits with attendant virtues, are the grim, disciplined forms of men-at-arms and a throng of magistrates and citizenry. At the left are symbolized Concord and Justice as the supporters of a well-ruled state. Here the symbolism is childishly obvious. Concord holds her smoothing plane. From her hand go strings which bind in fellowship a group of citizens below and lead above to the figure of Justice. Still higher is Wisdom. Justice deals punishment with one hand and grants aid with the other; the Middle Ages never admitted that Justice was merely punitive. The figures of Justice and Concord are superb,—Ambrogio’s Madonna type on a heroic scale.

As a pictorial representation of the finest mediæval ideas of statecraft, this fresco is of incomparable interest. As a decoration it is hardly successful. The theme has hampered the artist, the handling of the figures in several scales with the largest above, produces confusion and topheaviness. Beautiful in the parts, it is disappointing in the whole.

Far better merely as decoration is the companion fresco which represents the Effects of Good Government, Figure [53]. We have a peaceful city, the entrancing spectacle of Siena as she was about the year 1339. Girls are dancing a carol in the foreground with the quaintest dignity, mounted merchants are passing, and if the picture were better preserved, we should see the mechanics—or “artists” as they still call themselves in Italy—working cheerily in their shops. In its richness without confusion, this is the very triumph of the panoramic realism which Ambrogio made popular throughout Italy.

There are many more frescoes in this series, mostly by imitators of Ambrogio. The Sienese region is full of works by him or by his faithful followers. His panel pictures are in many galleries of Europe and America. They all confirm the record of Ghiberti that Ambrogio had the habits of a nobleman—a great sympathy, a fine scrupulousness, a real magnanimity. Certain contemporaries seem greater, Giotto surely, Simone Martini perhaps, but no Italian painter until Raphael himself reveals so complete and harmonious a development. We find no trace of the brothers Lorenzetti after 1348. Presumably they perished in the great plague of that year.

Fig. 52. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Peace, from the Fresco of Good Government.—Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

Fig. 54. Luca Tommé. The Assumption of the Virgin.—Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn.

Fig. 53. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Results of Good Government—The Peaceful City. Fresco.—Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.

For a century after the plague year, 1348, the painters of Siena imitated either the narrative realism of Ambrogio or the decorative sparseness of Simone Martini. It is customary to align them as of one camp or the other. We may indeed say that such painters as Lippo Memmi, Andrea Vanni, and Naddo Ceccarelli faithfully echo Simone, while such a master as the influential Bartolo di Fredi, who is traceable as late as 1388, seems completely Lorenzettian. But most of the painters follow freely both tendencies, employing Simone’s formulas in altar-pieces with few figures, and Ambrogio’s in narrative. Such eclecticism produced abundantly works of charm, for delicate sentiment and ornate workmanship, but rather few works of originality. Perhaps because of willingly accepted limitations, the average is higher than that of Florence. Throughout Italy it was a more popular style than the Florentine. It dominated the coast region from Naples to Valencia, penetrated into Umbria and the Adriatic marshes, and even got a temporary foothold in Florence itself. It fitted in better with mediæval ideals than the art of Giotto and Orcagna, which implied classical antiquity and anticipated the humanism of the Renaissance. On the whole Sienese art runs down after the Lorenzetti died, losing the robustness which Ambrogio had learned of Giotto, but its decline is gentle and interrupted by beneficent reactions towards its established glories. We may pass rapidly, and chiefly considering types, the fifty-odd years between the Lorenzetti and the new century.

Luca Tommé is credited with an exquisite little Assumption, Figure [54], in the Jarves Collection at Yale University. The picture, though it may be as late as 1370, repeats loyally the formulas which Pietro Lorenzetti invented nearly fifty years earlier. Perhaps Bartolo di Fredi, a rather superficial and over-fecund artist, best represents the average condition as the fourteenth century closed. In such a panel as the Adoration of the Magi, in the Siena Academy, Figure [55], we see the familiar theme for the first time expanded in a Lorenzettian sense. It becomes a pageant, probably under the influence of contemporary mystery plays. It is best conceived in the little scenes in the background; the facial types and the simplified setting on the whole recall Simone Martini. In other narrative pictures Bartolo vies with Ambrogio Lorenzetti in complication of planes and architecture. On the whole he is a rather faint echo, but his note while thin is also true.

Fig. 55. Bartolo di Fredi. Adoration of the Magi.—Siena.

Fig. 56. Barna. The Transfiguration.—Collegiata, S. Gemignano.

The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Passion we see in the Collegiate Church of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all accessories, and powerfully impressive for this reason. The mood is brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese country. In the fresco of the Transfiguration, Figure [56], he rises to sublimity. Fra Angelico will merely repeat him in San Marco sixty years later. Vasari tells us that Barna died from a fall from his painting scaffold in 1381, and that he was then young. If so, his originality was tremendous, for he cleared away ruthlessly all the delightful but trivial stage furniture so diligently collected by Duccio and the Lorenzetti. Modern criticism ascribes to him several panels, and I venture to add to the list the simple and stately Marriage of St. Catherine in the Boston Museum of Art. Certainly it is one of the most serious creations of the period. The type of the Christ and the concise and characterful arrangement seem to mark it as a fine Barna. The base is interesting, representing the composing of a blood feud, and Miracles of St. Michael and St. Margaret. While the simple pattern continues the tradition of Simone, Barna avoids Simone’s linear grace-notes. The finical element of the predecessor yields to a kind of realism. Barna is really the critic of the Sienese school. He silently insists that one may be decorative without too much artifice, and dramatic without overtaxing the stage carpenter, a very solitary and elevated spirit, to whom full justice has not yet been done.

Fig. 57. The Three Living and Three Dead, detail from the Lorenzettian fresco, The Triumph of Death.—Campo Santo, Pisa.

Most remarkable among the works inspired by the Lorenzetti is the coarsely effective Triumph of Death, Figure [57]. in the famous cemetery cloister, Campo Santo, at Pisa. It represents the hazards of the mortal life in view of certain death and judgment. At the left a royal hunting party is stopped short by the sight and stench of three festering bodies in coffins. The Hermit, Saint Macarius, points the obvious lesson that kings and lords and fair ladies will turn to dust. In the centre, miserable folk beckon and cry to Death to descend and put them out of their distress. The harridan death ignores the prayer and flies over a pile of corpses towards a gay garden party. Death loves to cut down the young and gay and happy, leaving the old and crippled to prolonged sorrow. In the upper left hand corner you have monks going about their quiet pursuits. The whole adjoining fresco is given up to the lives of such desert saints. At the upper right are angels and fiends struggling for little nude forms that represent human souls. This motive is a sort of overflow from a picture of the Last Judgment. The grim moral of the three pictures is that the worldly life is one of mortal peril, which may best be avoided by renouncing the world and joining a monastic order. The work was completed about 1375, is in the rougher following of the Lorenzetti, and has been famous ever since it was painted on the cloister wall. Entirely Sienese in its conception, in its ruggedness it transcends the usual softness of the school. It is the last significant work of the 14th century.

Siena passed into the fifteenth century without greatly changing her art. In the work of such traditional figures as Taddeo Bartoli one may observe a certain coarsening of the tradition. Mere splendor tends to replace the old delicacy, narrative painting becomes ever more complicated and confused. The latter tendency is manifested in frescoes which Domenico di Bartolo painted, between 1440 and 1443 for the Hospital of the Scala, Figure [58]. Their crowded picturesqueness grows legitimately out of the Lorenzettian tradition, as does the elaboration of architectural accessories. But the work also implies a certain knowledge of the current Florentine discoveries in linear perspective and in architecture. A small ingenuity runs pretty wild in these decorations, valuable as they are in picturing the times.

Fig. 58. Domenico di Bartolo. Clothing the Naked, from fresco series, the Seven Acts of Mercy.—Scala Hospital, Siena.

About the time these frescoes were designed, a renovation of Sienese painting was being made along divergent lines by Stefano di Giovanni, nicknamed Sassetta,[^[25]] and by the eager eccentric, Giovanni di Paolo. In both cases we have a reactionary reform. Sassetta restudies devoutly Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti, infusing his own tender mysticism both into decoration and narrative. In a manner he combines the two great currents of Siena’s past. We may best approach him through the triptych of the Birth of the Virgin in the Collegiate church at Asciano, Figure [59]. It is his earliest work painted not much later than 1428 when, being thirty-five years old, he joined the Painters’ Guild. The picture is conceived in the strictest Lorenzettian fashion, the frame being treated as the front or extension of the painted architecture. Aside from this carefully constructed setting, with its successive spaces, the casual and familiar distribution of the figures suggests strongly Pietro Lorenzetti. But the rich accessories in Sassetta’s hands are delicately selected, the humble gestures have an artless grace, the secondary figures such as the brocaded handmaid entering from the rear are fascinating in their own right. An air of alert gentleness runs through the picture. It is shared by persons of all ages. Such episodes as the chatting of two old men before a respectfully listening urchin add nothing to the story but strongly reinforce the faery charm of the whole. Winsomeness has supplanted the monumental quality of the older school. Above in the side gables are the scenes of the passing of the Virgin’s soul and her funeral procession, both conceived in the manner of the Lorenzetti. But the familiar forms are singularly animated by a new spirit of tenderness. By a paradox these little stories are really more like Duccio than any intervening work.

Fig. 59. Sassetta. The Birth of the Virgin.—Asciano.

Fig. 60. Sassetta. Marriage of St. Francis to Poverty.—Chantilly, France.

Fig. 61. Sassetta. Temptation of St. Anthony.—Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn.

Sassetta painted seven years on his masterpiece, the now scattered ancona for the Franciscan Church at Borgo San Sepolcro. The central panel was a St. Francis in ecstacy, now in Bernard Berenson’s collection. On the back were eight of the legends of the “Fioretti.” The panel was finished in 1444. Especially delightful is the panel at Chantilly which represents St. Francis’s mystical betrothal with Poverty, Figure [60]. This scene is before Monte Amiata, spaced off from the group by checkerboard fields. The maidens, Chastity and Obedience, sway lily-like beside their more resolute sister, Poverty, upon whose timidly offered hand the little saint firmly fixes a ring. Above, the celestial trio rises over the mountain line, Poverty turning a regretful face to her humble bridegroom. The simple pattern with its swaying lines derives from Simone Martini, but there is none of his petulant superiority in it, none of his nervousness. The realm is not the airless heights of a pure æstheticism but a very human dreamland. Again Duccio at his best is the closest analogy. Bernard Berenson in his admirable little book A Painter of the Franciscan Legend well describes the technical perfection of such work as this. It is conceived in “outlines which have in themselves an energy and vitality, that, whether they are representative or calligraphic, give off values of movement, and values of movement have the power to suggest the unembodied, life unclogged by matter, something in brief that comes close to the utmost limits of what visual art can do to evoke spirit.”

Apart from these sublimated reveries of Sassetta which express themselves in utmost delicacy of line, hue, and touch, he had a refreshing, drastic, almost a humorous side, which may be exemplified in a Temptation of St. Antony, Figure [61], in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. Beside his coral-red hut in a desert bounded by a wood that seems the world’s end, the Saint starts away from a demure and very plain little girl. He is perplexed, divining rather than seeing the tiny bats’ wings which mark her as a demon. The horizon is so curved that one almost feels the old earth swinging unconcernedly beneath this dilemma. A picture full of grotesque and authentic imagination, most true to the hobgoblin tradition of the expiring Middle Ages.

Sassetta died in 1450, and his two long-lived pupils, Sano di Pietro (1406–1481) and Giovanni di Paolo, (1403–1482) kept something of his influence alive for still thirty years.

Sano needs few words. He took nothing from his master but certain formal patterns, fine gilding and blithe colors. He repeats himself tediously, there are over fifty of his panels in the Siena Academy alone, yet is so genuine and unpretending that one forgets his lack of delicacy and insight. A little Coronation of the Virgin, at New Haven, may sufficiently represent his decorative phase. It is a nosegay of fair colors on burnished gold. In narrative painting he is Lorenzettian without the finesse of his master. At least he helped prolong a lovely tradition beyond its natural term, and that is his chief merit. “A famous painter and a man wholly dedicated to God”—(Pictor famosus et homo lotus deditus Deo)—we read in his death notice. Siena knew how to appreciate a traditionalist.

Fig. 62. Giovanni di Paolo. Young St. John Baptist goes to the Desert.—Formerly Charles Butler Coll., London.

Giovanni di Paolo, on the contrary, suffered not from deficient originality but from its excess. He selects restlessly from the older pictures. You will find pure Duccian figures in his paintings of the fifties. He studies the sparse decorative perfections of Simone Martini and exaggerates their nervousness. He drives expression into caricature, seeks strength in distortion, was the post-impressionist of his day. His extravagance is unpleasing in his larger pieces, but is piquant enough in his numerous small panels. One of a pair in English private possession shows the Youthful St. John jauntily setting off for the desert, with a quite cubistic treatment, Figure [62], of the lines of the fields. The motive is still more ingeniously employed in one of a remarkable set of pictures belonging to Mr. Martin Ryerson of Chicago. Giovanni’s predilection for distortion and grimace is shown in The Baptism of Christ, a pendant to the story of the youthful John, both being parts of one predella.

Fig. 63. Matteo di Giovanni. Saint Barbara with Saints.—S. Domenico.

Giovanni died in 1482 at the advanced age of seventy-nine, having faithfully preserved the old Gothic tradition while making it a vehicle of his own resolute eccentricity.

Fig. 64. Matteo di Giovanni. Massacre of the Innocents.

The slight concession which Siena made to the Renaissance was inaugurated by Lorenzo Vecchietta, active from about 1440 to 1480. He was primarily a sculptor and his silver altar-back was deemed worthy, in 1506, to displace the great Majesty of Duccio from the high altar of the Cathedral. Vecchietta chiefly shows the effect of his studies as architect and sculptor in a severe regard for anatomy, and in the Renaissance character of his architectural settings. He painted for the Cathedral of Pienza a majestic Assumption, his masterpiece. There are numerous frescoes by him at Siena; he is perhaps most agreeable in little stories elaborately set amid rich architecture, but he lacks the sprightliness of the true narrative tradition. “He was a melancholy and solitary person,” writes Vasari, “and always sunk in thought.” He did something to give to the Sienese painting of the end of the century a new and complicating thoughtfulness.

Fig. 65. Benvenuto of Siena. Assumption of the Virgin.—Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Far the most versatile painter at Siena in the second half of the fifteenth century was Matteo di Giovanni.[^[26]] He was not a native, but born about 1430 at Borgo San Sepolcro in upper Umbria. There he worked for a time with that stern realist Piero della Francesca. Thus Matteo brought to Siena better training than his fellows had, but he soon fell contentedly into the ways of the place. His madonnas and female saints have a new touch. They are more girlish and fragile than their predecessors, more exquisite, more fashionable. The type is represented in dozens of panels of which Enthroned Saint Barbara, at Saint Domencio, dated 1477, Figure [63], is a fine example.

Fig. 66. Girolamo di Benvenuto. Love bound by Maidens. Birth Salver.—Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn.

In such work Matteo continues the tradition of Sassetta along somewhat superficial lines of prettiness. He is far more original in the several versions of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which seeking a maximum of intensity he achieves only a very interesting sort of caricature. The picture at S. Agostino, Figure [64], dated 1482, is perhaps the best of the group. We are in the realm of the grisly fairy tale, at an ogre’s sports. The crowding, tumult, ornate architecture are simply Matteo’s attempts to refurbish the old Lorenzettian tradition. His real quality best appears in the outlines prepared for the figure decoration of the pavement of the Cathedral. In general his is an engaging but entirely undisciplined talent, oscillating after the fashion of the moment, alike in Florence and Siena, between mere prettiness and sheer restlessness. He died in 1495, Michelangelo’s star being already in the ascendent over neighboring Florence.

A kind of petrification of the traditional charm of Siena is in the work of Benvenuto di Giovanni, scholar of Sassetta. He cultivates a resplendent impassivity, is severe without much background of knowledge. His stiffness is gracious enough, like that of an aristocrat who maintains amid difficulties the dignity of an older school. His sense of formal pattern and skill in modeling in a very blond key may be enjoyed in his versions of the favorite theme of the Assumption. One of the best of these, dated at the end of the century in the year 1498, is in the Metropolitan Museum, Figure [65]. Benvenuto was born in 1436 and died about 1518. He might, had he chosen, have studied the whole realistic development from Fra Angelico to Leonardo da Vinci, but his painting keeps a chill virginal quality quite apart from life, its problems and allurements.

His son Girolamo continued the manner with less monumentality until his death in 1524. To his early activity belongs the delightful salver, Love Bound by Maidens, Figure [66], in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. It is merely the tray on which the gifts were presented to a young mother during the visits of congratulation. It was painted for some member of the famous Piccolomini family, presumably about the year 1500. The stern maidens who are plucking and binding the stripling Love, doubtless are personifications of Chastity, Temperance and the like. In the middle distance a knight rides off free to adventure since Love is safely bound. It is an odd theme for a gift to a young bride and mother, but the Italians never required consistency in their compliments. The daintiness of the treatment is typical for Renaissance painting at Siena, which never assumes a robust or realistic or humanistic accent.

There is a refinement which is the harbinger of death. It appears in Siena in the person of Neroccio di Landi. He sublimates the style of his great predecessors, Simone and Sassetta, adding freely the more delicate ornamentation of the Renaissance. There is a peculiar pallor in his coloring and tension in his modelling. It is an art of nerves and ecstasies, wholly etherial. An admirable Annunciation in the Jarves Collection at New Haven shows the rich setting, the odd blend of precision with a languor that marks Neroccio as true grandson of Simone Martini. There are many little panels of Madonnas with saints of amber translucency. They have the startling vividness and irreality of an hallucination. And there is a portrait of a girl in the Widener Collection, Figure [67], which is of a superlatively delicate prettiness. Neroccio was born in 1447 and died in 1500. With him passed the special fragrance of Sienese art.

Until 1475, Neroccio was in partnership with one whose ambition went far to destroy what Neroccio and Siena stood for. Francesco di Giorgio was born in 1439. With an ambition and resolution wholly un-Sienese, he mastered the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and engineering. He met Leonardo da Vinci at Pavia, worked for the tyrants of Milan, competed for the façade of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower at Florence. As architect and engineer it appears that he became a cosmopolitan, in painting it was hardly so. He is most delightful in his early phase which is represented by a bride-chest in the Wheelwright collection, Boston. It represents Prince Paris insolently appraising the charms of the rival goddesses, and at the right riding Troywards in disregard of the despair of forsaken Œnone. The classical theme is tinged with mediævalism, naturalized as Sienese. Later pictures, such as The Nativity, Figure [68], in the Sienese gallery, show Francesco uneasy, twisting his figures for grace and display of knowledge, working over the old landscape formulas in a semi-realistic sense, adding classical architecture, generally trying to break the bounds of the old idealism. The result is restlessness or at best an ambiguous charm. Siena is beginning to regret her isolation, to make vain efforts to overtake the tide of humanistic realism, to envy Florence, and even Perugia and Cortona. From the point of view of the Renaissance she was two generations behind, and no longer indifferent to the fact.

Fig. 67. Neroccio di Landi. Portrait of a Girl.—Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa.

Not merely Francesco di Giorgio tries to do in a decade the work of a century, but such younger contemporaries as Fungai and Pacchiarotti look to Florence or Umbria. Siena was given no time to reconstruct, and her old beautiful art could not readily assume new forms. Siena never assimilated the Renaissance. It invaded her, killed her native art and substituted one without local flavor. Before Francesco di Giorgio died, in 1502, he had seen Luca Signorelli called to Siena and the clever decorator Pintorricchio. Siena no longer trusted her own artists. Francesco probably took little note of the advent in 1501, of a young Piedmontese painter, Antonio Bazzi,[^[27]] nicknamed Sodoma, yet with Sodoma remained what little future there was in Sienese painting.

Fig. 69. Sodoma. Vision of St. Catherine of Siena. Fresco.—S. Domenico, Siena.

Sodoma brought to Siena the knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci, the new draughtsmanship in light and shade. He assimilated the sensibility of Siena but coarsened it. No painter of the time was more overtly sentimental. His famous St. Sebastian at Florence tells all that need be known about him,—his considerable skill, his exaggerated pathos, his clever use of poise and balance, his sober modern tonalities. His sentimental power is at its height in the fresco at S. Domenico, Siena, which represents S. Catherine swooning at the vision of her lover, the Christ, Figure [69]. Sodoma worked indefatigably in and about Siena till 1549. The few local painters of a progressive sort, Domenico Beccafumi, Girolamo del Pacchia, either directly imitate Sodoma or draw from similar alien sources. The only man of genius Siena produced in these years, Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536), soon went to Rome where in architecture he held his own with all comers, whereas in painting he became a modest imitator of Raphael.

In the ten years after 1500 the old art perished. Siena from being the last radiant exemplar of the glory of the mediæval spirit sunk to the estate of a fourth class station of the Renaissance. Her idealism could not bear the test of reality. Her domain had been that of legend and fairy tale and dream, she had ruled it exquisitely for two centuries until sheer taste had absorbed her little strength. She had left unforgettable records of her most precious feelings, but little record of her outer activities. Think how portraits abound in Florentine and Venetian art after 1450! There are practically none at Siena. So it would be futile to go to Siena for a greater understanding of the active life. But if you would requicken the sense of legend, live over again the tenderness mankind has ever felt for the beautiful past, hear some faint blowing of the horns of elfland—if you want this experience, then go to The gracious City of the Virgin and you shall find fulfilled the generous motto over her main portal—Siena will open her heart wide to thee.

Fig. 68. Francesco di Giorgio. Nativity.—Belle Arti.