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What a sight it must have been.
On June 9, 1311, DucciosThe Maestawas paraded from his studio to Sienas cathedral.
Bells rang as priests, monks, noblemen, and government officials walked beside it.
Citizens held candles in their hands.
How this feat of lending was pulled off might fill a book.
There are almost 100 works by at least 20 named artists.
Sienese painting represents a rupture in world art, breaking from Gothic flatness and hieratic Byzantine art.
It is more circumspect than Florentine painting, with its stricter proto-perspectival grids and solid minimalistic forms.
In Siena, perspective was just part of the mix.
Narrative of every kind, from the simultaneous to the sequential, is given tangible space.
(As my wife remarked, Perspective was really bad for painting.)
This explosion of innovation led to Flemish, Dutch, and northern painting.
The Sienese renaissance ended with half of Sienas population being wiped out by the Black Death in around 1350.
It took a generation for Sienese artists to reemerge.
By then, gossip-biographer Giorgio Vasari had situated Florence, Rome, and Venice as centers of Renaissance art.
On the right is Mary rising to her feet in palpable architectural space.
Her curving body is filled with a terrible foreknowledge of her sons death.
On the left is the archangel Gabriel raising his hand in a gesture of blessing and empathy.
His bioluminescent wings seemed to have been caught flapping in this beat between time.
In one panel a man born blind is healed as he is led before Christ.
In the same picture we see him happily walking away.
Beneath them, another space opens up with fish caught in a net visible beneath the waves.
This is a complete book of painterly knowledge.
In one scene, we witness the murder of a boy.
Here we have dimensionality, tactility, and the beauty and infinitude of being human.
Joseph finds the boy in the temple talking to teachers.
He brings him home grasping him by his shoulder and presenting him to a worried-sick mother.
This is human emotion and suffering wrapped together with psychological insight and sophisticated pictorial solution.
I love Sienese art.
When I was 10 years old, my mother left me alone in the Art Institute of Chicago.
Like an imprinted baby duck, I was taken by two small panels of Saint John the Baptist.
I thought,Is everything in this museum trying to tell me something?
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified the angel appearing in one of Duccios works.
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