Date: 14-10-2007
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010        
Subject: Middle Ages & Earlier    Renaissance      

The world of exhibition-making can be an infuriatingly conservative place. Such is the financial pressure on exhibition organisers to maximise attendances that they tend to stick with the familiar crowd-pulling names. So much so that it sometimes feels as if the entire history of Western art has been boiled down to a kind of celebrity A-list: Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Monet, Goya, Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Pollock, Warhol. As one museum director said to me a few years ago, “You do the same ten artists everyone has heard of, and when you’ve finished – you do them again.”

So hats off to the National Gallery for having the bravery to break new ground – new Old Master ground, at least – with its forthcoming exhibition, “Renaissance Siena: Art for a City”. This is a show unashamedly devoted to spreading the word about a group of artists whose names and whose works remain more or less completely unknown, save to a handful of specialist Renaissance art historians. The brainchild of a young and dynamic curator, Luke Syssons, the exhibition advances the polemical thesis that Renaissance Siena has for too long been allowed to languish in the shade of its illustrious neighbour – and bitter rival – Florence.

Siena is widely celebrated for its many masterpieces of medieval and early Renaissance art: the paintings of Simone Martini; Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the city’s Palazzo Communale; and above all Duccio’s great gold-ground polyptych, the Maesta, housed in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. These works, with their steep perspectives and distortions of scale, their otherworldly, almond-eyed madonnas and saints, clothed in richly intricate costumes designed simultaneously to arouse devotion and advertise Siena’s own principal business in the Middle Ages, the textile trade, are among the greatest jewels of fourteenth-century art.

But what of Sienese art during the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the period of history that saw the full flowering of the Italian Renaissance? Its story remains largely untold and unexplored, while many of its finest creations lurk in little visited churches, museums and civic chambers.

Inspired by Syssons’ thesis, I decided to put it to the test in situ – by visiting Siena in search of its hidden Renaissance gems. Several of the works that I saw will be travelling to London but many others can only be seen in the city itself. So what follows is an itinerary for the curious, a record of some of the places visited and some of the objects seen. It is not intended as a substitute for visiting the National Gallery’s exhibition, but as a complement to that experience, for those with the time and means to travel to Siena itself.

The Oratory of Saint Catherine is in Fontebranda, at the heart of Siena’s Contrada dell’Oca – the district of the Goose, ancient centre of the city’s dying and textile industries. Not much larger than the size of a barn, the oratory was built in the middle years of the fifteenth century, just after the canonisation of the charismatic Saint Catherine, who was herself the daughter of a Sienese dyer. It occupies the site where she was born. Several of Catherine’s many legends and miracles are illustrated in the frescoes on the chapel walls, painted in the early sixteenth century by a variety of minor artists such as Giacomo Pacchiarotti and Girolamo Pacchia. Above the altar, she is shown receiving the stigmata, while elsewhere she sends Florentine soldiers reeling  with the sheer force of her spirtuality. The Sienese have always hated Florence so any victory over the old enemy, actual or mythical, is liable to be recorded in the art of the city.

The main reason to visit the oratory, however, is not its paintings but a delicate polychrome statue of St Catherine carved from wood in 1475 by an artist named Neroccio. The work in question is a fascinating example of Sienese reticence in the face of Florentine Renaissance innovation. Influenced by new standards of realism in Florentine art – above all that of the greatest sculptor of the age, Donatello, who briefly lived and worked in Siena – Neroccio imparted to the saint’s body a degree of physical actuality quite unlike anything found in earlier quattrocento Sienese sculpture. Yet look into the statue’s face and the extent of his adherence to older, indigenous tradition is also clear. She has the faraway eyes and Byzantine features of the saints painted centuries earlier by Duccio and Simone Martini. Neroccio was prepared to embrace the startlingly new style that had been born in Florence, but only up to a point. Sienese art still had to look Sienese, after all.

Such is the continuing strength of Saint Catherine’s cult in the Contrada of the Goose that her sculpture is still held to possess magical powers. Behind a green door directly opposite the entrance to the Oratory of Saint Catherine lies the stable of the horse representing the Contrada in Siena’s famous horse-race, the Palio. Proximity to the oratory and its sacred statue is held to bring the horse luck. So it proved earlier this year, when the Contrada’s horse won. Flags still festoon the street in commemoration of the victory, so it is no surprise that the statue’s imminent journey to London is regarded with some trepidation in this part of Siena. A delegation from the Contrada will be travelling to the National Gallery in November to make sure that all is well with the carved image – a pilgrimage in propitiation of the hallowed local saint.

The Sienese remain more deeply rooted in their medieval traditions than the inhabitants of any other city in Tuscany or Umbria. But this nostalgia for deep and distant antiquity is no recent phenomenon. Even during the Renaissance, the Sienese harked back to what they saw as the glory days of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, creating a fascinating variant of Renaissance style full of elements drawn from the medieval past.

This is particularly apparent in Sienese painting. The city’s peaceful and little visited Pinacoteca Communale contains a sequence of Renaissance galleries that are, for the most part, an extraordinary capsule of calculated stylistic conservatism. Sano di Pietro’s paintings of the early fifteenth century are a world away from the works being created in Florence at the same time. With their distortions of scale and their liberal use of gold leaf, elaborately punched with patterns of snailshell intricacy, they testify to the long survival of the rich International Gothic style in Siena and its provinces.

Even the painters who thrived in Siena much later in the fifteenth century deliberately tempered those devices, such as mathematically calculated perspective, that were revolutionising painting across much of the rest of the Italian peninsula. The pictures of Francesco di Giorgio (1439-1501) combine a thoroughly quattrocento handling of the human form – rugged faces, alive with the immediacy of portraits – with a brilliant disregard for strict spatial logic. His work is a beautiful expression of the traditional Sienese love of richly decorated surfaces, the Sienese affinity for devotional works that resemble objets de luxe rather than illusions of a higher reality. His vertiginously anti-perspectival Assumption of the Virgin, in which the figures ascend heavenwards in neat concentric circles, might almost be a design for some extravagant piece of Gothic goldsmithery.

A more unlikely treasure-house of Renaissance painting is to be found within the State Archives of Siena. Open to the public but rarely visited by tourists, thisbuilding – just off the Piazza del Campo – contains a remarkable and unique collection of paintings known as Biccherne. These were originally commissioned as book covers, to decorate the accounts prepared by the civil magistracy, but by the time of the Renaissance they had metamorphosed into small paintings on panels of wood. Around 100 examples are preserved, dating from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, and collectively they tell an enchantingly fragmented version of the political and spiritual history of the city. Military victories are accomplished by multitudes of spidery figures, wielding swords or loading catapults, all in the shadow of Siena’s great belltower. A golden figure of the Madonna guides the ship of the Sienese state, peopled by some endearingly terrified mariners, through choppy waters full of jagged rocks. What is most striking about the collection as a whole is its consistency of style, allied to an almost fanatical sense of Siena as a city blessed by God and protected by the Virgin Mary. Long into the Renaissance, the Sienese painters of biccherna – who included the leading artists of the city, such as Francesco di Giorgio – created their images as if the Renaissance had never happened. Conservatism in art expressed a deep sense of continuity in the life of the state.

One of the few relics of Renaissance Siena to have made it on to the itineraries of mass tourism is the Piccolomini Library, which adjoins the city’s grand black-and-white cathedral. Painted to commemorate the life and works of Pope Pius II, it was created at the turn of the sixteenth century by the Umbrian painter Pinturrichio and his assistants, including the young Raphael. It is a glitteringly brilliant fresco cycle, full of a sense of space and light, of measure, order and calm, that sets it apart from anything else created in Siena during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Perhaps it could only have been created by artists who came from elsewhere. But even here, as if responding to the specific vagaries of Sienese taste, Pinturrichio and his team seem to look back in time. While the work contains some spectacularly adveturous atmospheric effects – including one of the earliest depictions of a thunderstorm in Renaissance art – it also makes numerous concessions to the Sienese love of gold, of finely depicted clothing and textiles.

It would be wrong to give the impression that Sienese Renaissance art was entirely dominated by the city’s unique and cussedly retrograde aesthetic, because in the 1520s Siena did finally produce a genuinely avant-garde and profoundly unconventional painter – although, like so much else in this part of the city’s story, he has been almost completely forgotten. His name was Domenico Beccafumi, and it is one of the explicit aims of the National Gallery’s exhibition to revive his reputation. It is a reputation well worth reviving.

There are several examples of Beccafumi’s work in Siena’s Pinacoteca, including a depiction of The Fall of the Rebel Angels so weird, so daringly phantasmagoric, that it might be a creation of the early nineteenth-century Romantic imagination. But his masterpiece is to be found in one of the least visited rooms of the Palazzo Communale. It was painted in the late 1520s, when Siena had briefly recovered its status as an independent city state, and can be found on the ceiling of the Sala del Consistorio (although very badly lit, and partly obscured by a pair of truly hideous cut-glass chandeliers). This work, which must be counted one of the greatest and most convulsively strange masterpieces of Mannerist art in all of Italy, is a manic celebration of republican political philosophy which was inspired principally by the writings of the Latin author Cicero. In panel after exceedingly idiosyncratic panel, Beccafumi shows tyrants of antiquity meeting a seemingly endless variety of bloody ends. There are defenestrations, beheadings and burnings at the stake – all carried out in a gracefully balletic style, and in a palette of singing, acid colours, that show Beccafumi’s admiration for Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling.