I Could Spend a Million Hours in the Met’s Weird and Wonderful Sienese Art Show

If I had to come up with a hook to justify writing about “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350”… well, it doesn’t really need a hook. Sienese art is the hook, and the show is the largest and best collection of painting and sculpture from this time and place that you will ever see in one museum. But if I needed to give the Met’s new exhibition a present-day hook, here’s the one I would give it, in one word: tactility.

I feel like a lot of people are talking about the tactile, about the need for culture that feels rooted in space and context, due to a felt loss of place and permanency in these digital times. And one of the things that’s so arresting here is the evidence of a time when images were felt as much as seen.

For that reason—and this is an extreme nitpick—I don’t love the exhibition’s “Rise of Painting” tagline. It situates Siena in the familiar story of the Renaissance, rendering it as lovable pre-history to Italian painting’s ascent to the empyrean, The Hobbit to the High Renaissance’s Lord of the Rings. (That’s how Giorgio Vasari, the progenitor of art history, treated Sienese painting when he wrote his Florence-centered The Lives of the Artists in the mid-1500s).

The artworks assembled for “Siena” have the mellow late-Medieval charm and hieratic conventionality that can be read, if you are so inclined, as the crude broth out of which the pure flavors of the High Renaissance were reduced. In paintings, multiple incidents and time periods coexist on one plane. Halos float in a nether realm between realistic illusion and flat gold geometry. Anatomy is approximate, not scientific. You can see why the various forms of optical perspective that arrived on the scene a century later would look so clarifyingly bold.

Another invention of the later Renaissance that affects our expectations of art is the Venetian innovation of painting-on-canvas, which made art literally lighter, more mobile. Basically, everything about this Sienese art feels weightier than later art, both in the stiffness of the figuration and in the inescapable consciousness that the works convey of themselves as material objects. You didn’t just look at this art. You either experienced it as a physical presence, as part of the architecture, or you had a tactile relationship to it as something you held (or imagined you held).

The star of this show is certainly the 13th-century master Duccio di Buoninsegna. And of the Duccio artworks here, the biggest attractions are the reunited panels of his Maestà altarpiece. (I wrote about just one of these panels, which comes from the Frick Collection, a few years ago.) These are graceful, concentrated images of Bible scenes, and I love them. They seem a little gawky now—charmingly so, to my mind—but their notes of imaginative proto-naturalism would grow and grow in influence.

When Duccio completed the commission in 1311, the Maestà altarpiece became the largest and most splendid painted altarpiece in Europe. Famously, the hefty two-sided structure was carried physically through the streets of Siena like a parade float, taken from his workshop and reverentially deposited in the city’s cathedral.

Joanna Cannon has an essay in the “Siena” catalogue that imagines the experience of communing with the Maestà altarpiece, and it’s a full-body affair: “To engage fully with one sequence of events within the overall narrative a devotee needed to stand close to an altarpiece that was almost 5 meters wide, and in order to connect with the full range of scenes they would have been obliged to move between at least three viewing positions.”

Later, this experience of Duccio’s magnum opus as an integrated physical attraction was broken. Duccio’s altarpiece was literally sawed apart in 1771, so as to separate the front and the back, to let viewers see its different sides at once—rendering it more purely visual. Various of its small panels were broken off and circulated as individual works of art. (It now it exists as “thirty-three separate pieces, scattered through ten collections in five different countries.”)

Throughout the half dozen or so galleries of “Siena: The Birth of Painting,” I savor the physical presence of the art on view. There are the finely wrought props for religious rites: chalices, scepters, crucifixes, and so on. There are the extraordinary little carved ivory relief sculptures, their figurative intricacies playing in a lovely limbo between 2-D and 3-D. There are the beautiful mini-altars that open up like tiny theaters or magic boxes.

There’s Simone Martini’s Orsini Polyptych (ca. 1335–40), a wonderful set of small paintings meant to be hinged together, folded up like an accordion-style book, and carried. Shown near it, there’s an actual book, a beautifully illustrated gold-leaf-on-vellum tome by the Limbourg Brothers. Its details shimmer as you circle it, as if coming to life.

And there’s Pietro Lorenzetti’s Tarlati Polyptych (1320), a brawny altarpiece that presides theatrically over you, as it would in church. I appreciate that it is displayed here so that you can walk around to its back and admire its sturdy carpentry as its own spectacle.

Hung near the Tarlati Polyptych is Madonna del Latte (Nursing Virgin) (ca. 1325) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (brother of Pietro). The panel it is painted on has a certain sculptural quality, with its triangular peak. But a wall label notes that it falls into the aesthetic middle ground that was still unusual in the Sienese context, as a mid-sized solo panel painting—it is neither intimately scaled for personal devotion, nor part of a more monumental construction for public ceremony.

Nevertheless, when you really look at the image, its relief-like aura clearly suggests a world where the optical and the material are mingled. Ambrogio’s figures—particularly baby Jesus’s legs and Mary’s breast—feel as if they are snapped together from different parts, like elements of a pop-up storybook. Mainly, the contrast between the modeled bodies and flat gold background, plus the way the halos are cut out against the inset brown border, gives the feeling that the image is swelling out of the surface toward you, rather than existing in a world that you are looking into, like a window.

All this was indeed the product of a late Medieval world, when a certain Italo-Byzantine flatness was developing toward a new kind of illusionism and personality (i.e. “the rise of painting”). It was a hybrid time. But there is a lot of delight in this hybridity—in a world of object-images and painting-sculptures.

I’m leaving aside a lot of useful and interesting history of Siena and its artists that you get from this show. For that… just go see the show.

I’ll be interested to see what the public makes of these treasures. Had Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird named one of their Ninja Turtles Duccio instead of Donatello, this fine exhibition would probably have 10 times the audience it will have. Which is a goofy way of saying: The art here is not perfectly in sync with today’s pop-cultural Italian Renaissance, either in terms of the names we know or the styles we worship.

The ambiguity of the “birth of painting” selling point is that, when it was rediscovered in the 19th century, Sienese “primitive” painting was viewed less as the origin story of a new refinement, and more as the reservoir of a lost directness. Against the pollution, squalor, and economic extremes of the Industrial Revolution, some in Britain looked to this zone of art history for grounding, finding in it art that sat closer to the earth of common experience. That’s what the critic John Ruskin found in the art of Siena and in Duccio. That’s why the Pre-Raphaelites called themselves Pre-Raphaelites.

I know that for myself, the art of “Siena” hits a similar contrapuntal chord right now. For the Victorians, crass materialism and academic over-refinement made the “sweet spirituality of medieval Siena” alluring (as Imogen Tedbury explains in the catalogue). For me, a present of high-speed digital junk and placeless culture throws into relief the beauty of an art from a time before free-circulating images had been fully perfected. At any rate, surely I will not be the only one who finds the art of “Siena” so… what’s the word?… touching.

“Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” is on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York, October 13, 2024–January 26, 2025.