SEven centuries ago a poet writes the most -ecstatic art reviews written. Francesco Petrarca, known as Petrarch, assigned Sienese artist Simone Martini to paint a picture of her beloved Laura. The result was so beautiful, he wrote, that if all the famous actresses of ancient Greece “competed for a thousand years they would not have seen a small beauty that had conquered my heart”.
Petrarch’s Rave review is correct. Heart conquest is what Martini and other 14th century painters do from Siena at exactly exactly exactly, during the exact exhibition about the moment Western Art has lived. Laura’s Simone’s painting is gone but you see why she’s the actress for the job. He was very expressive, soft, exploding any idea of Medieval art as remote.
There is a soluble assumption in the soft faces of the pale from its palazzo pubblico altarpiece shown as a row of pictures. Saint Anselm was a dreamer knight with a flag in his hand. Saint Luke, along with his sketchbook and stylus in The Ready as he looks diligently at the Virgin Mary, can be a self-portrait. The Virgin itself was angry as she looked, or mystically past us. Even the strapping of the baby Jesus in his arms was struck by wonderful, harmful thoughts under his golden hair mop.
Doesn’t this sensitive picture mean to enter European art later, with the age of Botticelli, Petrus Christus and Leonardo Da Vinci? The Renaissance, this exhibition shows, is in the microcosm in the creative explosion that occurred in a small hill city 700 years ago. The Siena of this exhibition has nothing to do with the tourist Siena of the Palio horse race. Instead you walk in a dark space where gold-mounted paints are taken by intense lighting, and suddenly fall into an inner world world.
The love between the mother and the child peeps into your mockery in a small, heart opening panel that the first thing to hit your eyes-a little Duccio’s painting, done some time between 1290 and 1300. Around it are examples of what a worshiper in a Church of Italy is usually seen at this time: the tough images of the virgin artists and their imitators. Duccio’s virgin and child exploded at those conventions. Instead of sitting cold in contact with her mother’s arms, Jesus, dressed like a small adult but with the baby’s hands and feet, reaching to touch her mother’s veil, pulling it to reveal her face.
Duccio has a touching, real -eyed eye how a real baby can touch Mummy’s face. This is the start of an intimate journey because the three generations of Sienese artists compete to be more alive in motherhood, ending with a baby Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna Del Latte where a living size baby looks at you with a big hand, letting us know her life with all her naked breasts in her little hand, That his life of milk is all for him.
Again, again, Simone Martini adds a genius twist. His painting that Christ discovered in the temple, lent by Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery, brings chronic psychology to a family tingling story. The teenager Christ wandered around in the temple, who was taking his parents. Joseph just returned him. Jesus seems to be rotting and talking. His father’s purple face indicates that he is only about controlling himself. Mary calmly sat down but her words, written in Latin in the book in her lap, almost translated as, “Son, why are you treating us this way?”
All of this emotional power comes from a space skill. The view was invented in Florence during the Renaissance, right? Not whole. The artists of the early 14th century Siena did not yet understand the systematic, “single-point” perspective that Leonardo would use. Instead they play slightly effects of perspective to create fairytale vistas of walls, merchants ships and the increasing interiors of Gothic cathedrals.
This playful mapping is in the most -time -Master in the masterpiece in the middle of this show. Duccio’s Maestà was a massive altarpiece that was damaged in the 18th century. The National Gallery owns three panels from a layer of scenes in the narrative underneath, known as a Predella. It borrowed companion panels to revive this miracle.
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You follow the row of paintings like a comic strip: Jesus defeated the devil, healing a blind man, raising Lazarus from the dead. But what is taking you is Duccio’s spatial conjuring. As the Devil teases Christ to throw himself from the highest point of a temple, we see an amazing -a wonderful solid, polygonal building filling the wooden panel, even though it seems to be emerging. Christ confirmed Satan on a marble balcony given to the depth of fooling. You can see inside where Gothic arches and a particoloured pavement withdraw from hypnotic reality. This is not just visual trickery. Space creates emotions. The stability of the real things means that when the demon dares to jump Christ, there is a danger.
Poetry again is key. Duccio is the contemporary Dante whose holy comedy describes hell, purgatory and paradise as real places with the same spatial accuracy that makes it a surprise. Like Dante, you will be guided through the other worlds through this exhibition. O Siena!
