Sienese School

That's not really what the painting is for, though, or why the painting is worth looking at.

It's because Duccio, in the Sienese tradition, well, actually sort of inaugurating the Sienese tradition of painting, is a great, great colorist.

And paintings of the Renaissance era, these devotional paintings, would generally speaking have gold ground, very thin gold leaf, which was laid over an orange or red paint underneath.

And the gold is so thin, and this was by taking gold coins and hammering them out until they were literally thinner than a piece of paper, almost translucently thin, which allowed the warmth of the red or the orange paint underneath to come through the gold.

And as a result, these paintings have a glow to them, which is really wonderful.

It's actually easier to see this sort of glow with the Simone Martini painting.

Simone Martini, another great Sienese painter, in the Lehman Wing, because in that case, you're in a very small room with low lighting, which is perfectly suited.

There's too much light, really, in these European galleries to make this painting shine the way it should.

There's a beautiful one that I've always liked very much by Andrea di Bartallo from the 15th century, early 15th century, 1400 to 1405.

He is a Sienese painter.

It was part of a large, large altarpiece that had many scenes of the life of Our Lady.

And then there were little kind of events that represent these sacred events in her life, in the life of Mary.

when he and i had been students in paris we had belonged to a little group which devoted itself to speculations about alchemy and mysticism more orthodox in most of his beliefs than michael robarts he had surpassed him in a fanciful hatred of all life and this hatred had found expression in the curious paradox, half borrowed from some fanatical monk, half invented by himself, that the beautiful arts were sent into the world to overthrow nations, and finally life herself, by sowing everywhere unlimited desires, like torches thrown into a burning city.

This idea was not at the time, I believe, more than a paradox, a plume of the pride of youth, and it was only after his return to ireland that he endured the fermentation of belief which is coming upon our people with the reawakening of their imaginative life presently he stood up saying come and i will show you for you at any rate will understand and taking candles from the table he lit the way into the long paved passage that led to his private chapel be passed between the portraits of the jesuits and priests some of no little fame his family had given to the church and engravings and photographs of pictures that had especially moved him and the few paintings his small fortune eked out by an almost penurious abstinence from the things most men desire had enabled him to buy in his travels The pictures that I knew best, for they had hung their longest, whether reproductions or originals, were of the Sienese school, which he had studied for a long time, claiming that it alone of the schools of the world pictured not the world, but what is revealed to saints in their dreams and visions.

The Sienese alone among Italians, he would say, could not or would not represent the pride of life, the pleasure in swift movement or sustaining strength or voluptuous flesh.

They were so little interested in these things that there often seemed to be no human body at all under the robe of the saint.

But they could represent with a bowed head or uplifted face man's reverence before eternity as no others could.

The number of thousands varied in the different legends, but all put it high.

Henry Wimbush was forced to sell some of his primitives, a Taddeo da Pontibonci, an Amico de Taddeo, and four or five nameless Sienese to the Americans.

There was a crisis.

For the first time in his life, Henry asserted himself, and with good effect, it seemed.

They are in a tiny room of... 13th and 14th century Italian painting.

And you will see in this room three very small panels from a five panel altarpiece by Simone Martini, who is a Sienese artist, one of the great colorists.

In Renaissance art, the Sienese painters were famous for their sense of color and the Florentine painters were famous for their ability in drawing.

In actual

fact, it's sort of a Matisse Picasso situation.

Yes.

But in actual fact, the Florentines had many great colorists.

It's just that the Sienese view of color was particularly, I think, warm and gorgeous and deep.

When design was afterwards improved by Giotto, many men also improved the figures in marble and stone, as did Andrea Pisano and his son Nino, and his other disciples, who were much better than the early sculptors and gave their statues more movement and with much better attitudes.

As also did those two Sienese masters, Agostino and Agnolo, who made the tomb of Guido, Bishop of Arezzo, as it has been said, and those Germans who made the facade at Orvieto.

It is seen, then, that during this time sculpture made a little progress, and that there was given a somewhat better form to the figures, with a more beautiful flow of folds in the draperies, and sometimes a better air in the heads and certain attitudes not so stiff, and finally that it had begun to seek the good, but was nevertheless lacking in innumerable respects, seeing that design was in no great perfection at that time, and there was little good work seen that could be imitated.

Wherefore those masters who lived at that time, and were put by me in the first part of this book, deserve to be thus praised and to be held in that credit which works made by them merit, if only one considers, as is also true of the works of the architects and painters of those times, that they had no help from the times before them, and had to find the way by themselves, and a beginning, however small, is ever worthy of no small praise.

There were a bunch of, I think, six rich guys, and then they decided to, uh, invite six artists of the, uh, successful artists of the time, you know.

You know, they all collected the Sienese, uh, masters, you know, and all that, you know.

Everything was, you know, figuration, figuration, figuration.

You know, portraiture is a big, big deal.

There was also Perugino and Luca Signorelli.

Additionally, there was the famed Sienese painter Giovanni Bazzi, also known as Il Sodoma, which is what we sometimes still call him today.

It simply means the Sodomite.

And of course, Michelangelo the Florentine was called upon to do the Sistine ceiling.

And looking over Pythagoras' shoulder is the famed Arab mathematician and philosopher Averroes, very much signaled Arab, he was operating as a Muslim in Spain.

to the extreme right, we see Raphael himself as the famed ancient painter Apelles.

Next to him is probably a painter of that Sienese artist, Il Sodoma, and they stand with Zoroaster, that is the founder, the founding figure of Zoroastrianism, that Persian religion, who holds the celestial globe, or the Looks an awful lot like the fellow Urbino portier that we talked about, Baldassare Castiglione, who wrote the Book of the Courtier and who Raphael painted a portrait of.

And bent down before them doing a demonstration is the figure of Euclid.