The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

by Edmund G. Gardner

WE may conveniently begin the story of Sienese art with the coming of Niccolò Pisano to Siena in 1266, the year after Dante’s birth, for the work of the great marble pulpit of the Duomo. Niccolò’s son, Giovanni, became a citizen of Siena, and was chief architect of the Duomo during the two closing decades of the century. Stimulated by their presence and example, there rose an independent school of Sienese sculptors, which flourished from the end of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century—a school which chronologically succeeds to that founded by Niccolò Pisano, and anticipates the rise of the Florentine school under Andrea Pisano’s influence. These Sienese sculptors were mainly employed upon the Cathedrals of Siena and of Orvieto, and in making tombs in other cities of Italy, sepulchral monuments in which, writes M. Reymond, “the Sienese school reveals a very special and new character, which is the subordination of the religious idea to the civil idea.”[60] Tino da Camaino, who sculptured the famous tomb of Henry VII. at Pisa and worked for the royal Angevins of Naples; the architects, Agostino di Giovanni and Agnolo di Ventura; Cellino di Nese, who made the tomb of the poet Cino at Pistoia; Gano da Siena and Ramo di Paganello; Lorenzo Maitani, whose fame is for ever linked to the glorious Duomo of Orvieto; these are the masters of chief repute in this early Sienese school.

All these belong to that bright epoch in the story of Siena previous to the great pestilence of 1348. Then there came a sad decline, as the statues of the Apostles in the chapel of the Campo, executed between 1376 and 1384, show only too clearly. But, just at the time that St Catherine was beginning her public life, Siena became the mother of one of the greatest sculptors of the Renaissance.

Giacomo della Quercia was the son of a goldsmith named Pietro di Agnolo, a citizen of Siena, and was born in Siena or its contado in 1371 or 1374. His first artistic studies were made in Siena itself where, there being then no great native sculptors, he drank inspiration almost solely from the great pulpit of the Duomo. This, perhaps, is what makes him so isolated a figure in the art of the Quattrocento; the heir of Niccolò Pisano, the forerunner of Michelangelo. He left Siena when it fell into the hands of the Duke of Milan, and went to Florence, where he was chiefly impressed by the work of Giotto and Andrea Pisano. In 1401 he entered the competition for the second bronze gates of the Baptistery, and came next to Ghiberti and Brunelleschi; his figures, says Vasari, were considered good, but lacking in refinement, non avevano finezze. A few years later, at Lucca, he carved that tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, made famous in our own days by the eloquent enthusiasm of Ruskin. His native city now began to recognise his genius. In 1409 he was commissioned to make the famous fountain of the Piazza del Campo, upon which he worked at intervals between 1412 and 1419—going off to do other work at Lucca, and forced by the Signoria to return under heavy financial penalties. In 1416 he was commissioned by the Operaio, or superintendent of the artistic work of the Duomo, to design the Font for the Baptistery,

and in the following year to cast two bronze scenes, storie, for the same. But here again he undertook things elsewhere—in Bologna, this time—and the Signoria had to compel him to finish what he had begun, which he did in 1434. In the meanwhile, he had accomplished his supreme work at Bologna in the bas-reliefs on the pilasters of the door of San Petronio—those marvellous scenes from the Book of Genesis, in which he seems to anticipate the achievement of Michelangelo in the Cappella Sistina. Giacomo died at Siena in 1438. His style is grand and austere, full of force and vigour, with a kind of rugged greatness that contrasts curiously with the manner of contemporary Sienese painters; he dispenses with accessories, concentrating the interest upon the human figures in his stories. There is peculiar nobility and power in his treatment of the nude. “Sooth to say, Giacomo had only one pupil, and for him there was a century to wait; he was Michelangelo.”[61]

No other Sienese sculptor of the Quattrocento approaches Giacomo’s solitary greatness. Pietro del Minella (1391-1458) was his favourite pupil and assistant, but caught little of his spirit. The two Turini—Turino di Sano and his son Giovanni (1384-1455)—were associated with him on the work for the Baptistery, and acquitted themselves creditably, even by the side of Donatello and Ghiberti. Then come two men of greater mark: Antonio Federighi (died about 1480), and Lorenzo di Pietro (1412-1480), called Il Vecchietta. The former, who is said to have been connected with the Tolomei, was also an architect, as the “grandiose simplicity” of the Loggia that he built for Pius II. shows; as a sculptor, he is perhaps the most classical of the Sienese masters of the Quattrocento, following not unworthily in the steps of both Giacomo della Quercia and Donatello. Vecchietta appears to have been actually Giacomo’s pupil; his principal works are in bronze, somewhat hard and dry in style, with excessive attention to anatomical details. Giovanni di Stefano (died after 1498) and Urbano da Cortona (died 1504), by the latter of whom are some tolerable works in the Duomo and elsewhere, are conscientious scarpellini, with no original genius. To Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502), the pupil of Vecchietta, are ascribed—frequently on no adequate grounds—a number of the chief buildings in Siena in the style of the earlier Renaissance; as a military architect, he stands high among the craftsmen of his century, and was much employed by the Dukes of Urbino. Like his master Vecchietta, he was also a worker in bronze and a painter. Of his fellow-pupil Neroccio di Bartolommeo Landi (1447-1500), it will be best to speak among the painters; his few extant works in sculpture have a peculiar combination of dignity and sweetness, which is at once impressive and winning. Giacomo Cozzarelli (1453-1515) was a pupil of Francesco di Giorgio; he designed the famous palace of Pandolfo Petrucci and made those wonderful torch-holders and other metal work for its exterior, which are only surpassed by Caparra’s masterpieces in this kind on the palace of Filippo Strozzi at Florence. Lorenzo di Mariano, called Il Marrina (died in 1534), is the last great sculptor of the Sienese Renaissance; as a decorator in marble he has few if any equals, and his masterpiece in the oratory of Fontegiusta need not fear the comparison with the best Florentine work of the epoch.

Nor should we pass from the sculptors without a word on the wood-carvers, who are among the minor artistic glories of Siena. Domenico di Niccolò (who died about 1450), called Del Coro from his work in the chapel of the Palazzo del Comune, Antonio Barili (died 1516), and Giovanni Barili (died 1529), produced work in this kind which is hardly surpassed in any Italian city of the Renaissance.