At the back of the Palace is the picturesque market-place, the Piazza del Mercato. Out of the market, the Via de’ Malcontenti and the Via di Porta Giustizia still indicate the ways by which condemned prisoners were conveyed in carts to the place of execution beyond the walls. We know that the feet of St Catherine frequently trode this mediaeval via crucis; but it is questionable whether the execution of Niccolò di Toldo took place in the ordinary spot, as there is frequent record of political prisoners being done to death in front of the Palace and elsewhere. In his fresco in San Domenico, Bazzi seems to identify the place with the little valley before us, between the hills of Montone and Santa Agata, crowned by the churches of the Servites and Augustinians.
CHAPTER VI
The Duomo and the Baptistery
RISING majestically above Siena, crowned with the mosaic of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin in Paradise, as though to make her seem still floating in air over the city that had chosen her for Queen, is the vast Duomo. Tradition has it that a temple of Minerva once stood upon this hill, and that upon its ruins was built the first fane to Maria Assunta, Our Lady of the Assumption.
Some such building had existed from the end of the tenth century; but the present “tiger-striped cathedral,” the most truly Gothic of all ecclesiastical buildings in Tuscany, belongs for the most part to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The hexagonal cupola was finished in 1264, four years after Montaperti and the year before Dante’s birth. The Campanile, with its curious turrets at the angles, was built in the following century. But the original building did not satisfy the Nine and the turbulent, prosperous citizens that they ruled. While prolonging the Duomo Vecchio, as it was called, to the east up to the present Baptistery (in those very years, between 1317 and 1321, in which Dante was at Ravenna, finishing his Paradiso), defects were discovered in the architecture; and in February 1322 (1321 in the old Sienese style) Lorenzo Maitani, with four other masters, proposed to the General Council of the Campana that a new cathedral should be erected: “we advise that, to the honour of God and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, His Most Holy Mother—who ever was, is, and will be in time to come, the Head of this city of Siena—there be begun and made a beauteous, great and magnificent church, which shall be well-proportioned in length, height, and breadth, and in all measures which pertain to a beauteous church, and with all splendid ornaments which pertain to and befit so great, so honourable and beauteous a church; to the end that our Lord Jesus Christ and His most holy Mother, and His most high celestial court, in that church may be blessed and glorified in hymns, and the said Commune of Siena be ever protected by them from adversity and be honoured perpetually.”[76] It was decided that the old Duomo should be preserved; but merely as the transept of this new ecclesia pulchra, magna et magnifica; and in December 1339 the new nave was begun, the architect Pietro di Lando, who was then working for King Robert of Naples, being summoned back to Siena to superintend, as “a man of great subtlety and invention.” He was succeeded by Giovanni di Agostino; but the pestilence of 1348, followed by the fall of the Nine in 1355, caused the work to be abandoned. The Sienese turned back to their Duomo Vecchio with renewed vigour, and, in the early years of the fifteenth century, the great work was practically completed—before Brunelleschi had crowned the rival Cathedral of Florence with his mighty dome.
Going up the Via di Monna Agnese, or climbing the steps from the Baptistery, we pass under a richly-worked doorway, in the tympanum of which the Redeemer is enthroned with Angels. This would have been a door at the end of the right aisle. As it is, it leads us into a spacious piazza, with the Duomo, as at
