Fig. 56. Barna. The Transfiguration.—Collegiata, S. Gemignano.
The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Passion we see in the Collegiate Church of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all accessories, and powerfully impressive for this reason. The mood is brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese country. In the fresco of the Transfiguration, Figure [56], he rises to sublimity. Fra Angelico will merely repeat him in San Marco sixty years later. Vasari tells us that Barna died from a fall from his painting scaffold in 1381, and that he was then young. If so, his originality was tremendous, for he cleared away ruthlessly all the delightful but trivial stage furniture so diligently collected by Duccio and the Lorenzetti. Modern criticism ascribes to him several panels, and I venture to add to the list the simple and stately Marriage of St. Catherine in the Boston Museum of Art. Certainly it is one of the most serious creations of the period. The type of the Christ and the concise and characterful arrangement seem to mark it as a fine Barna. The base is interesting, representing the composing of a blood feud, and Miracles of St. Michael and St. Margaret. While the simple pattern continues the tradition of Simone, Barna avoids Simone’s linear grace-notes. The finical element of the predecessor yields to a kind of realism. Barna is really the critic of the Sienese school. He silently insists that one may be decorative without too much artifice, and dramatic without overtaxing the stage carpenter, a very solitary and elevated spirit, to whom full justice has not yet been done.
Fig. 57. The Three Living and Three Dead, detail from the Lorenzettian fresco, The Triumph of Death.—Campo Santo, Pisa.
Most remarkable among the works inspired by the Lorenzetti is the coarsely effective Triumph of Death, Figure [57]. in the famous cemetery cloister, Campo Santo, at Pisa. It represents the hazards of the mortal life in view of certain death and judgment. At the left a royal hunting party is stopped short by the sight and stench of three festering bodies in coffins. The Hermit, Saint Macarius, points the obvious lesson that kings and lords and fair ladies will turn to dust. In the centre, miserable folk beckon and cry to Death to descend and put them out of their distress. The harridan death ignores the prayer and flies over a pile of corpses towards a gay garden party. Death loves to cut down the young and gay and happy, leaving the old and crippled to prolonged sorrow. In the upper left hand corner you have monks going about their quiet pursuits. The whole adjoining fresco is given up to the lives of such desert saints. At the upper right are angels and fiends struggling for little nude forms that represent human souls. This motive is a sort of overflow from a picture of the Last Judgment. The grim moral of the three pictures is that the worldly life is one of mortal peril, which may best be avoided by renouncing the world and joining a monastic order. The work was completed about 1375, is in the rougher following of the Lorenzetti, and has been famous ever since it was painted on the cloister wall. Entirely Sienese in its conception, in its ruggedness it transcends the usual softness of the school. It is the last significant work of the 14th century.
Siena passed into the fifteenth century without greatly changing her art. In the work of such traditional figures as Taddeo Bartoli one may observe a certain coarsening of the tradition. Mere splendor tends to replace the old delicacy, narrative painting becomes ever more complicated and confused. The latter tendency is manifested in frescoes which Domenico di Bartolo painted, between 1440 and 1443 for the Hospital of the Scala, Figure [58]. Their crowded picturesqueness grows legitimately out of the Lorenzettian tradition, as does the elaboration of architectural accessories. But the work also implies a certain knowledge of the current Florentine discoveries in linear perspective and in architecture. A small ingenuity runs pretty wild in these decorations, valuable as they are in picturing the times.
Fig. 58. Domenico di Bartolo. Clothing the Naked, from fresco series, the Seven Acts of Mercy.—Scala Hospital, Siena.
About the time these frescoes were designed, a renovation of Sienese painting was being made along divergent lines by Stefano di Giovanni, nicknamed Sassetta,[[25]] and by the eager eccentric, Giovanni di Paolo. In both cases we have a reactionary reform. Sassetta restudies devoutly Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti, infusing his own tender mysticism both into decoration and narrative. In a manner he combines the two great currents of Siena’s past. We may best approach him through the triptych of the Birth of the Virgin in the Collegiate church at Asciano, Figure [59]. It is his earliest work painted not much later than 1428 when, being thirty-five years old, he joined the Painters’ Guild. The picture is conceived in the strictest Lorenzettian fashion, the frame being treated as the front or extension of the painted architecture. Aside from this carefully constructed setting, with its successive spaces, the casual and familiar distribution of the figures suggests strongly Pietro Lorenzetti. But the rich accessories in Sassetta’s hands are delicately selected, the humble gestures have an artless grace, the secondary figures such as the brocaded handmaid entering from the rear are fascinating in their own right. An air of alert gentleness runs through the picture. It is shared by persons of all ages. Such episodes as the chatting of two old men before a respectfully listening urchin add nothing to the story but strongly reinforce the faery charm of the whole. Winsomeness has supplanted the monumental quality of the older school. Above in the side gables are the scenes of the passing of the Virgin’s soul and her funeral procession, both conceived in the manner of the Lorenzetti. But the familiar forms are singularly animated by a new spirit of tenderness. By a paradox these little stories are really more like Duccio than any intervening work.
