Fig. 52. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Peace, from the Fresco of Good Government.—Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
Fig. 54. Luca Tommé. The Assumption of the Virgin.—Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn.
Fig. 53. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Results of Good Government—The Peaceful City. Fresco.—Palazzo Pubblico, Siena.
For a century after the plague year, 1348, the painters of Siena imitated either the narrative realism of Ambrogio or the decorative sparseness of Simone Martini. It is customary to align them as of one camp or the other. We may indeed say that such painters as Lippo Memmi, Andrea Vanni, and Naddo Ceccarelli faithfully echo Simone, while such a master as the influential Bartolo di Fredi, who is traceable as late as 1388, seems completely Lorenzettian. But most of the painters follow freely both tendencies, employing Simone’s formulas in altar-pieces with few figures, and Ambrogio’s in narrative. Such eclecticism produced abundantly works of charm, for delicate sentiment and ornate workmanship, but rather few works of originality. Perhaps because of willingly accepted limitations, the average is higher than that of Florence. Throughout Italy it was a more popular style than the Florentine. It dominated the coast region from Naples to Valencia, penetrated into Umbria and the Adriatic marshes, and even got a temporary foothold in Florence itself. It fitted in better with mediæval ideals than the art of Giotto and Orcagna, which implied classical antiquity and anticipated the humanism of the Renaissance. On the whole Sienese art runs down after the Lorenzetti died, losing the robustness which Ambrogio had learned of Giotto, but its decline is gentle and interrupted by beneficent reactions towards its established glories. We may pass rapidly, and chiefly considering types, the fifty-odd years between the Lorenzetti and the new century.
Luca Tommé is credited with an exquisite little Assumption, Figure [54], in the Jarves Collection at Yale University. The picture, though it may be as late as 1370, repeats loyally the formulas which Pietro Lorenzetti invented nearly fifty years earlier. Perhaps Bartolo di Fredi, a rather superficial and over-fecund artist, best represents the average condition as the fourteenth century closed. In such a panel as the Adoration of the Magi, in the Siena Academy, Figure [55], we see the familiar theme for the first time expanded in a Lorenzettian sense. It becomes a pageant, probably under the influence of contemporary mystery plays. It is best conceived in the little scenes in the background; the facial types and the simplified setting on the whole recall Simone Martini. In other narrative pictures Bartolo vies with Ambrogio Lorenzetti in complication of planes and architecture. On the whole he is a rather faint echo, but his note while thin is also true.
Fig. 55. Bartolo di Fredi. Adoration of the Magi.—Siena.
