Fig. 62. Giovanni di Paolo. Young St. John Baptist goes to the Desert.—Formerly Charles Butler Coll., London.
Giovanni di Paolo, on the contrary, suffered not from deficient originality but from its excess. He selects restlessly from the older pictures. You will find pure Duccian figures in his paintings of the fifties. He studies the sparse decorative perfections of Simone Martini and exaggerates their nervousness. He drives expression into caricature, seeks strength in distortion, was the post-impressionist of his day. His extravagance is unpleasing in his larger pieces, but is piquant enough in his numerous small panels. One of a pair in English private possession shows the Youthful St. John jauntily setting off for the desert, with a quite cubistic treatment, Figure [62], of the lines of the fields. The motive is still more ingeniously employed in one of a remarkable set of pictures belonging to Mr. Martin Ryerson of Chicago. Giovanni’s predilection for distortion and grimace is shown in The Baptism of Christ, a pendant to the story of the youthful John, both being parts of one predella.
Fig. 63. Matteo di Giovanni. Saint Barbara with Saints.—S. Domenico.
Giovanni died in 1482 at the advanced age of seventy-nine, having faithfully preserved the old Gothic tradition while making it a vehicle of his own resolute eccentricity.
Fig. 64. Matteo di Giovanni. Massacre of the Innocents.
The slight concession which Siena made to the Renaissance was inaugurated by Lorenzo Vecchietta, active from about 1440 to 1480. He was primarily a sculptor and his silver altar-back was deemed worthy, in 1506, to displace the great Majesty of Duccio from the high altar of the Cathedral. Vecchietta chiefly shows the effect of his studies as architect and sculptor in a severe regard for anatomy, and in the Renaissance character of his architectural settings. He painted for the Cathedral of Pienza a majestic Assumption, his masterpiece. There are numerous frescoes by him at Siena; he is perhaps most agreeable in little stories elaborately set amid rich architecture, but he lacks the sprightliness of the true narrative tradition. “He was a melancholy and solitary person,” writes Vasari, “and always sunk in thought.” He did something to give to the Sienese painting of the end of the century a new and complicating thoughtfulness.
Fig. 65. Benvenuto of Siena. Assumption of the Virgin.—Metropolitan Museum, New York.