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Pietro Lorenzetti, Sobach’s Dream (from the predella of the high altar of Santa Maria del Carmine, Siena), 1329.
Tempera on wood, 37 × 44 cm.
Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena.
If it should be inquired which of the painters of Siena most completely displays these general features, one might answer that Simone Martini is their best representative, being an easel painter above all, whilst the Lorenzetti are, as Ghiberti so truly remarked, the dramatic creators of the school, men of great intellect and imbued with the qualities which, in their fullest measure, combined to form the greatness of Giotto. Whilst the latter really incarnated the ideas of the age of Dante, and gave the true feeling and grandeur to a new and youthful art, which Angelico remodelled into religious pathos and Masaccio raised to the grandiose. The Sienese revelled in a medley of coarser elements and affectations of grace and tenderness, re-adorning the old dress with new embellishments, infusing brilliancy into colour and taste into ornament while never rejecting the old types or forms.
Based on solid foundations, the Florentine school advanced rapidly and easily to the perfection of the sixteenth century, being led by its admirable comprehension of the laws of distribution and division of space to the study of perspective, whilst the Sienese remained enchained in the fetters of old custom. Yet, Siena was not without her own essential originality. She rivalled Florence in political independence at least into the fourteenth century; and in an age of uncontrolled passion she stamped art with an unmistakable impression.
Her architecture, sculpture, and painting were all her own, as different as her people from those of Florence; and this difference extended not merely to Siena, but to all Umbria. The Florentine were staid and grave, while the Sienese and Umbrian were bright and lively. A barrier, conqured, perhaps, by one painter, parted the masters of the rival republics; to a certain extent, this favoured the originality of Siena, which with less independence might have lost herself in imitation and subsequently failed in the legitimate influence which she wielded in Italy. She remained second to Florence because she created no rival to Giotto, but otherwise she stood on an equal footing and contended with her for the palm of excellence; the Sienese Duccio, Ugolino, and Lorenzetti competing with the Florentines on their own turf, though Siena boasted of no great Florentine within her walls before Spinello and Donatello. Siena, however, may still justly affirm that her influence was, after Giotto’s death, more extensive than that of Florence. Orcagna tempered classical grandeur with Sienese gentleness and grace. Traini imbibed lessons from the works, if not from the precepts, of Simone and the Lorenzetti, and combined Florentine with Sienese character. Giovanni da Milano derived from Siena his brilliancy of colour, his grace of motion in females, his finish and breadth in draperies and costume, his minuteness and care in exquisite and precise outlines, betraying, one would think, his contact with Simone. Lorenzo Monaco and Spinello took something also from the same sources and set an example to the many subordinates who were ever ready to receive impressions from wherever they originated. At Pisa, where Sienese painting was always favoured, the local art, though second rate, was but another edition of that of Duccio and his followers. Taddeo di Bartolo reigned supreme in the fourteenth century.
The Sienese, therefore, made an ample return for the profit which they gained from the sculptures of Niccola and Giovanni, though Pisa was not able to take advantage of that return and progress as Siena had done. The grand and exclusive field of Siena’s influence, however, was Umbria. Orvieto owed to her all that she yielded in sculpture or painting; Gubbio, Fabriano, and neighbouring cities produced examples that can hardly be distinguished from those of Siena herself. At the close of the fourteenth century, Taddeo di Bartolo contributed mainly to the formation of the school of Perugia which, rising as it were from the ashes of Gubbio and Fabriano, laid the foundation of its greatness and, outliving that of Siena, rivalled in number if not in quality the painters of the fifteenth century in Florence. The school which preceded Perugino was impressed with something of Sienese character, which Perugino himself inherited in more abundance than the Florentine. He was a graceful, sometimes affected and testy, more gentle than severe colourist. Yet, in the fifteenth century, Florence gave more in quality if less in quantity, and towered then as ever over all of Italy; if she found in Siena a rival in the fourteenth, she left her behind in the next age when Ghiberti, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Paolo Uccello, Angelico, Masaccio, and Ghirlandaio showed themselves to be of a different scantling from that of Domenico di Bartolo, Sano di Pietro, Benvenuto di Giovanni, Matteo di Giovanni di Bartolo, Girolamo di Benvenuto, Lorenzo di Pietro (Vecchietta), Francesco di Giorgio, or Jacopo della Quercia.
From its rise in the fourteenth century, the course of Sienese art might have been predicted. Starting on a narrow basis when compared with Giotto’s, it was sure to be distanced. Siena bequeathed, however, when she fell, a school to Perugia which took her place and contributed much to the education of the immortal Raphael.
Early Christianity and Art
The Mother of God between two angels, Madonna Della Clemenza, c. 700.
Icon with encaustic, 164 cm.
Santa Maria in Trastevere, Rome.
The early Christians confounded in their horror of heathen idolatry all imitative art and artists; they regarded with decided hostility all images and those who created them as bound to the service of Satan and heathenism. Hence, all visible representations of sacred personages and actions were therefore confined to mystic emblems. Thus, crosses signified redemption; fish, baptism; ships represented the church; serpents, sin or the spirit of evil. When, in the fourth century, the struggle between paganism and Christianity ended in the triumph and dominance of the latter and artistic activity was revived, it was, if not in a new form, in a new spirit through which the old forms were to be gradually moulded and modified. The Christians found the shell of ancient art remaining; traditional handicraft still existed. Certain models of figure and drapery handed down from antiquity, though degenerated and distorted, remained in use, and were applied to illustrate, by direct or symbolic representations the tenets of a purer faith. From the beginning, the figures selected to typify redemption were those of Christ and the Virgin, first separately, and then conjointly as the ‘Mother and Infant’. The earliest monuments of Christian art are to be found, nearly effaced, on the walls and ceilings of the catacombs at Rome, to which the early persecuted martyrs of the faith had fled for refuge. The first recorded representation of Christ is in the character of the ‘Good Shepherd’, and the attributes of Orpheus and Apollo were borrowed to express the character of he who “redeemed souls from hell,” and “gathered his people like sheep.” In the cemetery of St. Calixtus in Rome, the most ancient dipiction was discovered: a head of Christ. The figure is colossal; the face a long oval; the countenance mild, grave, melancholy; the long hair, parted on the brow and falling in two masses on either shoulder; the beard not thick, but short and divided. Here then, obviously imitated from some traditional description (probably the letter of Lentulus to the Roman Senate, assumed to be a fabrication of the third century), we have the first emergence of the type, the generic character since adhered to in the representations of Christ.
A controversy arose afterwards in the early Christian Church which had a determinately significant influence on art as it subsequently developed. One party, with St. Cyril at its head, maintained that the form of Christ, having been described by the prophet as without any outward comeliness, ought to be represented as utterly hideous and repulsive in painting. Fortunately, as the future success of the faith would prove, the most eloquent and influential among the fathers of the Church, St. Jerome, St. Augustin, St. Ambrose, and St. Bernard, took up the opposing side of the arguement. The pope, Adrian I, also threw his infallibility into the scale, and from the eigth century we find it decided, and later confirmed by a papal bull, that Christ should be represented with all the attributes of divine beauty which art in its then unrefined state could lend him.
Since that time the accepted and traditional type for the representation of Christ has been strictly attended to – a tall, slender figure with a long oval face; a broad, serene, elevated brow; a mild, melancholy, and majestic countenance; the hair (“of the colour of wine or wine lees” – which may mean either a dark rich brown or a golden yellow