To see the National Gallery’s exhibition of paintings from early 14th century Siena is to participate in an act of fragmentary world-building. Most the works are small enough to fit in a tote bag, while consistently referring to a much bigger edifice of which they were a part, which is as architectural and civic as much as it is spiritual. And yet, because that world no longer actually exists, to imagine it is also to attend to its ruin.

We are given an idea of what that world was in the opening wall text. In 1300, Siena was much more politically and economically active than the open-air museum it is today. It was one of Europe’s first centres of banking, an important stop on a pilgrimage route to Rome, and a republic, with a curious form of government whereby a different set of nine men were elected to rule the city every two months. Of particular iconographic importance to the works in this show is the city’s exceptionally pronounced devotion to the Virgin Mary, who was revered as the city’s protector saint, with its cathedral, town hall, hospital, and many other buildings dedicated to her. The Virgin, therefore, was a model not only of the Church, but also of this particular city.




This I find particularly interesting when I turn to the first painting that greets us. Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Virgin and Child (c.1290-1300) presents a mother cradling her son, looking directly into his eyes – the label says with a “tragic expression that reveals her knowledge of her child’s future suffering.” It seems to me that this foresight is confirmed by – if not dependent on – her son’s reaction, the way he returns her gaze and reaches out to hold her veil, as if consoling her. And, just as crucially – it is as if he were unveiling her. The painting is an apt introduction to the show, for not only does Christ unveil his mother, he unveils Siena. And yet the crumbling state of the work, its chipped frame, and the cracks in its surface, speak also to that Siena’s fragmentation, and thus its disappearance.

And so, such incidental damage takes on meaning, reminding us that what we are seeing can only be an imperfect reconstitution of a past. The image’s frail corporeality is in tune with medieval apophatic (or “negative”) theology, its holiness affirming itself backhandedly through its deterioration, as if saying: “This is the material shadow of what I truly am.” I see a metaphor for this duality – the unveiling of that which is not there – at the foot of the painting’s frame, in two semicircular gaps eroded by candles, lit time and again by devout beholders. The flames that illuminated the image also burnt it – as if the spiritual exigencies of prayer always superseded material longevity, suggesting, perhaps, that the image’s deterioration is not as incidental as I just said it was. And now the burns are like a footprint, a trace of a past that bespeaks its absence.




Whether or not the Sienese saw this painting this way at the time, there is no getting away from the work’s condition, which now dovetails with Duccio’s painfully exquisite, loving touch, which altogether are why I find the work – which might as well be a synecdoche of the whole show – so affecting. And although no one can be certain if Duccio intended Christ’s gesture to be seen as revelatory (the most direct reference would be Christ’s ministry at the church that his mother is understood to embody), it is hard to unsee such an interpretation once it has been made. And he does it again. The child takes charge of his mother’s veil in Duccio’s Triptych with the Virgin and Child, Saint Dominic, Saint Aurea, Patriarchs and Prophets (c.1312-15), gripping it with both hands. The same might be said of Christ’s double grip on his mother’s veil in Simone Martini’s Virgin and Child (c.1326-27), in which his outward gaze wants to communicate to us.



The exhibition begins with Duccio, before guiding us through the other key figures of the Sienese school: Simone, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, with the occasional appearance of associated figures such as the sculptor Tino di Camaino. The frequent depiction of cities, the architectural trompe-l’oeil effects (such as the marble parapet in Duccio’s Virgin and Child), the frames in the form of curved and pointed arches, the multipaneled altarpieces that open up like doll’s houses, as well as Ambrogio’s 1:1 underdrawings for his Annunciation frescoes at Siena’s Abbey of San Galgano (c.1334-36) and the fragments of Tino’s colossal Tomb for Gastone della Torre (1318-21), semiotically establish Siena as a constant presence, often with the private sphere mirroring the public in miniature. Never far from my mind are Ambrogio’s famous frescos of good and bad government in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico (1338-39), in which the state of the city’s buildings reflects civic morality. This notion can be quite literal: in one of Duccio’s panels that originally adorned the back of the predella of his Maestá in Siena’s cathedral (1308-11), when Christ resists the Devil in the temple, the suggestion is that he is preserving its clean, white, polygonal purity.

The governmental setting of the Palazzo Pubblico seems to have fed into Simone’s altarpiece panels that he likely made for that building (1326-30), consisting of four paintings of saints – Ansanus, Peter, Andrew, and Luke – flanking another of the Virgin Mary. I am struck by the stately formality of the ensemble. Measuring roughly 60 by 40 centimetres, the rectangular panels – without gables or arches – are larger than most of the works here, while the men are emotionally reticent, their bows to the Virgin ceremonious. The sequence is a far cry from Simone’s Saint John the Evangelist (1320) on an adjacent wall – he is near to tears, his mouth curved inwards, echoing the incline of his chest which envelops his heart-like praying hands, all to impart a sense of empathic woundedness. One of the earliest surviving secular portraits in Europe is Simone’s Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the Siege of Montemassi (c.1330), a fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico, and my feeling is that the panels flanking the Virgin in his altarpiece for that building take on the tenor of civic portraits. It is with stately as well as holy gravitas that the saints honour Siena’s protector.




Simone’s altarpiece stands out in part because so many of the works here were intended for private devotion, not public ceremony. Duccio’s candle-burnt Virgin and Child and Simone’s St John the Evangelist, for instance, were intended for domestic use and their intimacy reflects this. The latter was the wing of a folding, portable altar, of which there are several complete examples in this show – most resplendently Duccio’s aforementioned folding triptych, Simone’s Orsini Polyptych (1333-40), and Pietro’s Diptych with the Virgin and Child and Man of Sorrows (c.1340-45) – their format evoking their use and movement within and between residences.

In Pietro’s altar, an intimate, slender dash of red between the Virgin’s face and her son’s is the interior of her cloak, which as always is blue on the outside to symbolise her spiritual supremacy (ultramarine, made of lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, was the most expensive colour). Together, the two colours suggest a union of her protective spirit (felt as bodily warmth) over the corporeal world – the ultimate sign of corporeality being death, symbolised in Christ’s ashen body within a tomblike frame of trompe-l’oeil marble in the opposite panel. Such protective and maternal warmth, stored within this fold-up-able aid to prayer, cannot be separated from the architecture and ideology of the home.

One of Ambrogio’s four panels relating the life of Saint Nicholas (c.1332-34) sets its narrative within such a space, and although it was likely commissioned for a chapel in the Church of San Procolo in Florence – the success of the Sienese school meant that some of its members found patronage in Italy’s other cultural hubs – the work is an advocation of domestic worship. Ambrogio includes each of the narrative’s episodes within the same panel: during a feast in the house – which according to the work’s hagiographical source is in honour of Saint Nicholas – a boy is tempted into the street by a shadowy devil, who then strangles him to death; the boy’s corpse is laid on a bed, as his family around him pray; an airborne Nicholas beams healing rays through a window, resuscitating the boy, while one family member prays before the saint in gratitude. The suggestion is that the piety of the household – expressed in the honorific banquet and the prayers – saves the boy, who is too young to leave the house on his own. (Saint Nicholas is of course the precursor of Santa Claus, a mythic being who bestows gifts on households once a year.)




A world is reassembled. Its constituent works are cracked, chipped, burnt, and bruised as surfaces and frames merge with their subjects. Halos are tangibly tooled into gold leaf backgrounds, blurring the distinction between the immaterial subject and the thing that stands for the city itself – all to remind us of that world’s ruin, metaphorically represented in Lando di Pietro’s wooden sculpture of Christ’s head (1338), a fragment of an almost life-size crucifix damaged by Second World War bombings. To be affected by such frailty is not necessarily to indulge in a ruin as romantic escapism, for it can be a way of looking at the past to lay the grounds for an affective commons in the present. There is something viscerally relatable in such physical vulnerability, especially when it is so intimate, and imbued – as so many of the works here are – with love and death.

Ruination extends to the geographical dispersal of the works and fragments, which have come from collections across the US and Europe, landing in London – after being shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York – to reconstitute the spiritual, civic, and artistic life of an Italian city 700 years ago. Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 will not go to Siena, nor is it really an export of that city, the works having long resided elsewhere. Time transforms a place into a dislocated image of itself, appearing, reappearing, and disappearing all at once, as the rebuilding of worlds allows us to contemplate more deeply their dismemberment.