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.