In Stanza VI., a picture by Sano di Pietro (2) in the composition of the principal scene—the Madonna and Child surrounded by kneeling Saints—shows a certain resemblance to Fra Angelico. In the Crucifixion above, St Francis is receiving the stigmata, and two Franciscan nuns are aiding the holy women to tend the Blessed Virgin; the predella, however, is by a later hand. The chief contents of this room are the works of Matteo di Giovanni, on the whole the most powerful and most versatile Sienese painter of the fifteenth century, and Neroccio di Bartolommeo Landi, a “Simone come to life again” in the air of the Renaissance.[65] By the former are three beautiful Madonnas (5, 7, 9), somewhat varied in type and style. By the latter, whose figures are stately and gracious like those of his statues, very sweet and winning in expression, are the large enthroned Madonna and Saints (8); four smaller pictures (11, 13, 14, 22), in two of which no one can fail to be struck with the painter’s exquisite realisation of the personality of St Catherine; and the signed and dated Madonna and Child of 1476, with St Michael and San Bernardino (19), one of the master’s earlier works. Francesco di Giorgio Martini is represented by three very small pictures (15, 16, 17) of Old Testament scenes, an Annunciation (21), and three Madonnas (20, 23, 24). We have also some interesting works by lesser masters. By Pietro di Domenico (1457-1501), who was influenced by the Umbrians, is the Adoration of the Shepherds with St Galganus and St Martin (3), the Galganus having struck his sword into the rock at the Divine Child’s feet; the date seems to read 1400, only because the latter part has been obliterated. By Guidoccio Cozzarelli (1450-1516) are a Saint Sebastian (25) and Our Lady as protector of the Arts (29), the Queen of the Artisans.
Stanza VII. contains unimportant fragments and engravings.
With the opening of the Cinquecento, Siena grew dissatisfied with the antiquated methods of her native artists. Three mediocre painters, indeed, carried on their traditional manner well into the sixteenth century: Bernardino Fungai (1460-1516), Girolamo di Benvenuto (1470-1524), the son of Benvenuto di Giovanni, and Giacomo Pacchiarotti (1474-1540), Fungai’s pupil, a turbulent fellow, whose pusillanimous, half-crazy attempts to pose as a political revolutionary are immortalised in a novella by Pietro Fortini and a poem by Robert Browning. But in the meanwhile, better masters had been brought to Siena from other cities; Luca Signorelli and his pupil, Girolamo Genga, from Cortona and Urbino, had come to decorate the palace of the Magnifico; Bernardino Pinturicchio of Perugia had been hired by the Piccolomini, and his great fellow-citizen, Pietro Perugino, was painting altarpieces for Sant’Agostino and San Francesco.
And, greater than any of these, there came one whom Siena made her own: Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549), presently to be known as Sodoma. The son of an artisan of Vercelli, Bazzi had gone to Milan and fallen under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, though it is doubtful whether he actually became his pupil. In 1501 certain merchants, agents of the Spannocchi, brought the young man to Siena, with which city—save for the short period from 1508 to 1510, when he worked in Rome mainly for the rich Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi—he was henceforth associated. Morelli regarded Bazzi as “the most important and gifted artist of the school of Leonardo—the one who is most easily confounded with the great master himself.” Frequently careless and very unequal in his execution, the exquisite beauty of his women’s faces can hardly be surpassed; and “in his best moments, when he brought all his powers into play, Sodoma produced works which are worthy to rank with the most perfect examples of Italian art.”[66] He was a wild and reckless fellow enough in his life, passionately addicted to horse-racing, and a lover of strange beasts and birds. Of these latter he kept a whole collection round him, great and small of every kind that he could get, until, in Vasari’s phrase, “his house seemed verily to be the Ark of Noah.” In a list of his goods which Bazzi drew up for taxation in 1531, eight race-horses and a number of these other creatures are set down, and the catalogue ends—may my fair readers pardon me the quotation!—with “tre bestiacce cattive, che son tre donne.”
These varied influences combined with that of Florence to produce eclecticism; “a most singular and charming eclecticism, saved from the pretentiousness and folly usually controlling such movements by the sense for grace and beauty even to the last seldom absent from the Sienese.”[67] The three principal Sienese painters of this kind are Girolamo del Pacchia (1477-1535), Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), and Domenico di Giacomo di Pace (1486-1550), called Mecarino or Beccafumi. Girolamo del Pacchia was the son of a Hungarian father and a Sienese mother; he learned the first principles of art in Siena (probably from Fungai), and then went to Florence and Rome, returning to Siena in 1508 where he soon fell under Bazzi’s influence. Like Pacchiarotti (with whom he used to be confused) Girolamo became involved in plots and conspiracies, and was forced to fly from Siena. Baldassare Peruzzi is one of the most famous architects of the Renaissance. As a painter he first worked under Pinturicchio, then went to Rome where he laboured much for the Popes and Agostino Chigi, falling under the influence of Bazzi and later of Raphael, whom he succeeded as chief architect of San Pietro. In the sack of Rome he was taken by the Spaniards, cruelly tortured, and escaped to Siena in a state of abject poverty. The Sienese made him public architect to the Republic, and afterwards Capomaestro of the Duomo. There are a number of buildings attributed to him in Siena, mostly doubtful. He ended his days in the Eternal City, working on the fabric of San Pietro. Of Baldassare’s paintings Siena only possesses a few of his earliest and some of his very latest. Domenico di Giacomo was the son of a contadino on the estate of Lorenzo Beccafumi (whom we have already met in the political field) in the plain of the Cortine near Montaperti. Lorenzo found him, like Giotto, drawing on the sand and stones the movements of the animals under his charge, took him into his household, had him taught to paint, and gave him his own family name. “Domenico was a virtuous and excellent person,” says Vasari, “and studious in his art, but excessively solitary.” He worked at Rome, Genoa and other places, but told his friend and admirer, Vasari, that he could do nothing away from the air of Siena. At different epochs he imitated Perugino, Bazzi, Fra Bartolommeo, even Michelangelo; an unequal but imaginative painter, he excels in the treatment of light and shade. Two other artists of this epoch deserve special mention—Andrea Piccinelli, called Del Brescianino, the son of a Brescian, who painted between 1507 and 1525, first following Girolamo del Pacchia, afterwards imitating Fra Bartolommeo; and Bartolommeo Neroni, called Il Riccio, whose work belongs to the middle of the century, the son-in-law and chief pupil of Bazzi. To complete the sketch of Sienese art in the first half of the Cinquecento, we must add a painter who comes slightly earlier than these two: Matteo Balducci, a native of the Perugian contado, who appears originally to have been Pinturicchio’s assistant and pupil, and afterwards to have become a pupil of Bazzi.[68] His work, however, shows no trace of the influence of the latter master, but is purely Umbrian in character.
In Stanza VIII., besides a series of small pictures painted for the Confraternity of Fontegiusta (1, 2, 35, 36), is Bazzi’s famous fresco of Christ at the Column (27), even in its damaged condition unmistakably divine. His Judith (29) is likewise a work of great beauty; but the St Catherine ascribed to him (32) is unworthy alike of the painter and of the subject. The two frescoes (8, 9), representing a Ransom of Prisoners and the Flight of Aeneas from Troy, come from the palace of Pandolfo Petrucci; they were executed by Girolamo Genga, but the composition is probably by Luca Signorelli. Two Madonnas (12 and 30) are ascribed by Mr Berenson to Girolamo del Pacchia. By Matteo Balducci are an Angel (21) and the Madonna and Child, with St Catherine and San Bernardino (34). There is also a Madonna (26) by Girolamo Magagni, called Giomo, a pupil of Bazzi’s, who robbed his master’s studio while the latter lay sick in Florence. Both in this room and the next there is some excellent wood carving by Antonio Barili.