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.”