Far the most versatile painter at Siena in the second half of the fifteenth century was Matteo di Giovanni.[[26]] He was not a native, but born about 1430 at Borgo San Sepolcro in upper Umbria. There he worked for a time with that stern realist Piero della Francesca. Thus Matteo brought to Siena better training than his fellows had, but he soon fell contentedly into the ways of the place. His madonnas and female saints have a new touch. They are more girlish and fragile than their predecessors, more exquisite, more fashionable. The type is represented in dozens of panels of which Enthroned Saint Barbara, at Saint Domencio, dated 1477, Figure [63], is a fine example.
Fig. 66. Girolamo di Benvenuto. Love bound by Maidens. Birth Salver.—Jarves Coll., New Haven, Conn.
In such work Matteo continues the tradition of Sassetta along somewhat superficial lines of prettiness. He is far more original in the several versions of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which seeking a maximum of intensity he achieves only a very interesting sort of caricature. The picture at S. Agostino, Figure [64], dated 1482, is perhaps the best of the group. We are in the realm of the grisly fairy tale, at an ogre’s sports. The crowding, tumult, ornate architecture are simply Matteo’s attempts to refurbish the old Lorenzettian tradition. His real quality best appears in the outlines prepared for the figure decoration of the pavement of the Cathedral. In general his is an engaging but entirely undisciplined talent, oscillating after the fashion of the moment, alike in Florence and Siena, between mere prettiness and sheer restlessness. He died in 1495, Michelangelo’s star being already in the ascendent over neighboring Florence.
A kind of petrification of the traditional charm of Siena is in the work of Benvenuto di Giovanni, scholar of Sassetta. He cultivates a resplendent impassivity, is severe without much background of knowledge. His stiffness is gracious enough, like that of an aristocrat who maintains amid difficulties the dignity of an older school. His sense of formal pattern and skill in modeling in a very blond key may be enjoyed in his versions of the favorite theme of the Assumption. One of the best of these, dated at the end of the century in the year 1498, is in the Metropolitan Museum, Figure [65]. Benvenuto was born in 1436 and died about 1518. He might, had he chosen, have studied the whole realistic development from Fra Angelico to Leonardo da Vinci, but his painting keeps a chill virginal quality quite apart from life, its problems and allurements.
His son Girolamo continued the manner with less monumentality until his death in 1524. To his early activity belongs the delightful salver, Love Bound by Maidens, Figure [66], in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. It is merely the tray on which the gifts were presented to a young mother during the visits of congratulation. It was painted for some member of the famous Piccolomini family, presumably about the year 1500. The stern maidens who are plucking and binding the stripling Love, doubtless are personifications of Chastity, Temperance and the like. In the middle distance a knight rides off free to adventure since Love is safely bound. It is an odd theme for a gift to a young bride and mother, but the Italians never required consistency in their compliments. The daintiness of the treatment is typical for Renaissance painting at Siena, which never assumes a robust or realistic or humanistic accent.
There is a refinement which is the harbinger of death. It appears in Siena in the person of Neroccio di Landi. He sublimates the style of his great predecessors, Simone and Sassetta, adding freely the more delicate ornamentation of the Renaissance. There is a peculiar pallor in his coloring and tension in his modelling. It is an art of nerves and ecstasies, wholly etherial. An admirable Annunciation in the Jarves Collection at New Haven shows the rich setting, the odd blend of precision with a languor that marks Neroccio as true grandson of Simone Martini. There are many little panels of Madonnas with saints of amber translucency. They have the startling vividness and irreality of an hallucination. And there is a portrait of a girl in the Widener Collection, Figure [67], which is of a superlatively delicate prettiness. Neroccio was born in 1447 and died in 1500. With him passed the special fragrance of Sienese art.
Until 1475, Neroccio was in partnership with one whose ambition went far to destroy what Neroccio and Siena stood for. Francesco di Giorgio was born in 1439. With an ambition and resolution wholly un-Sienese, he mastered the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and engineering. He met Leonardo da Vinci at Pavia, worked for the tyrants of Milan, competed for the façade of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower at Florence. As architect and engineer it appears that he became a cosmopolitan, in painting it was hardly so. He is most delightful in his early phase which is represented by a bride-chest in the Wheelwright collection, Boston. It represents Prince Paris insolently appraising the charms of the rival goddesses, and at the right riding Troywards in disregard of the despair of forsaken Œnone. The classical theme is tinged with mediævalism, naturalized as Sienese. Later pictures, such as The Nativity, Figure [68], in the Sienese gallery, show Francesco uneasy, twisting his figures for grace and display of knowledge, working over the old landscape formulas in a semi-realistic sense, adding classical architecture, generally trying to break the bounds of the old idealism. The result is restlessness or at best an ambiguous charm. Siena is beginning to regret her isolation, to make vain efforts to overtake the tide of humanistic realism, to envy Florence, and even Perugia and Cortona. From the point of view of the Renaissance she was two generations behind, and no longer indifferent to the fact.
Fig. 67. Neroccio di Landi. Portrait of a Girl.—Widener Coll., Elkins Park, Pa.