Medieval Siena gets its place in the spotlight

If you think that Italy’s great cultural awakening began in 15th-century Florence, think again. That is what next year’s banner exhibition at the National Gallery will encourage us to do when it brings together art and objects from 14th-century Siena, reminding us that late-Medieval Florence’s political and economic rival can also be considered its equal in the history of art.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 is a vast, ambitious reunion, reconvening Trecento masterpieces from Siena’s golden age by the likes of Duccio di Buoninsegna, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers. Panel paintings that were once parts of polyptychs, elaborate metal-and-enamel vessels, and bejewelled textile fragments will conjure up the city state at its peak, when it was pioneering new notions of civic responsibility, piety and prosperity. And, as the show will argue, it prompted the western world to turn a momentous corner, away from the static nature of Byzantine-influenced art to more human—and ultimately humane—representations.

“Something clearly remarkable is happening in the city of Siena in the early 14th century,” says Caroline Campbell, the former National Gallery curator, who is continuing to plan the show from her new post as director of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin. “You get a series of artists who are doing something transformative,” she says of Duccio and his famous followers. “They’re looking at narrative, at what painting is—these are people who really changed what painting could do.”

Siena, 75km south of Florence and cut off from the country’s high-speed train network, now feels like an idyllic backwater, frozen in time but coming to life each summer for Il Palio, the Medieval-style rodeo that takes over the city’s spectacular 14th-century square, the Piazza del Campo. But back in the decades before the Black Death, Siena, on the main pilgrimage route between northern Europe and Rome, had international standing as an economic powerhouse, pioneering modern banking and republican-style government.

Its commercial, political and artistic apogee was arguably reached on 9 June 1311, when, as legend has it, the immense central panel of Duccio’s Maestà altarpiece, showing an enthroned Virgin and Christ child surrounded by a detailed assembly of saints and angels, made its way in a procession from the artist’s workshop to the cathedral.

A unique event in European art

Once comprising over 40 individual panels, the Maestà—at once both religious and political, with the figure of the Virgin viewed as protector of the city—is a unique event in European art, a supreme and varied work of storytelling that launched the whole Sienese school. Falling out of fashion in the 16th century and taken apart in the 18th century, the Maestà is still partly in situ. However, its fascinating back base, or predella, which depicts scenes from the life of Christ, ended up scattered among the world’s great museums.

The National Gallery and its collaborator, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the show will begin in October, hope to bring all eight surviving predella panels together. Marked by a naturalism that predates the Renaissance by a century, the paintings are set to be exhibited in their original order. The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew, from the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, shows a serene Christ figure gesturing to his baffled and blunt-faced fishermen-apostles. The fine gold hem of Christ’s drapery contrasts the dull filigree of the fishermen’s net, full of notably realistic fish.

Duccio (around 1255-1319) left behind an ambassador in his pupil Simone Martini (around 1284-1344), whose travels took him from the Angevin court in Naples to the Papal Court in Avignon, where the Sienese school left its mark on France. Campbell says scholars are now fairly certain that much of Simone’s Orsini Polyptych, a six-panel altarpiece created between 1326 and 1334, ended up for a time outside Dijon, court of the dukes of Burgundy, where it helped “to form the basis of French painting”, she says. She traces Siena’s influence all the way to Britain, citing the National Gallery’s own Wilton Diptych (around 1395-99) as a work in the Sienese style.

Remarkably, Campbell and her co-curators are uniting all six Orsini panels for both the London and New York versions of the show. The two reverse panels, on loan from Antwerp, show a pathos-filled Annunciation scene, with the Virgin recoiling in fear and doubt—one of a number of pictures that Campbell lauds for its emotional resonance.

Saint John ‘makes you want to cry’

Another Simone work of great pathos, Saint John the Evangelist (1320), is on loan from the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in Birmingham; depicting the Gospels author as a beardless figure in mourning for the crucified Christ, the painting “makes you want to cry”, she says.

It is not mere happenstance that this work ended up in the West Midlands, or that Maestà panels landed in New York’s Frick Collection and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. Trecento Sienese art was discounted by 16th-century Florence, when the defeated Sienese Republic was absorbed into the new Medici-ruled Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and Giorgio Vasari wrote his still influential history of Italian art from a decidedly Florentine perspective.

Later misattributed by 18th- and 19th-century connoisseurs—who, among other errors, mistook Duccio for Cimabue or Fra Angelico—Sienese Trecento art needed to be rediscovered and reclaimed, with British and American aficionados leading the way. Campbell says the show reflects new research by Imogen Tedbury, the National Gallery’s acting curator of Italian paintings before 1500, who traces the revival of interest in Siena to an ever-widening circle of Anglo-American dealers, collectors and curators.

American collecting prowess in our own time will be on display in the National Gallery thanks to the Met’s own headline-grabbing Duccio, Madonna and Child (around 1290-1300), acquired with great fanfare in 2004, for a price thought to be around $45m. Also known as the Stoclet Madonna, after the Brussels collector who hung it in his Josef Hoffmann villa, it is being lent for the first time since it entered the Met’s collection. Siena’s thriving Trecento came to an abrupt halt with the spread of the Black Death in the late 1340s. Campbell concedes Siena’s most celebrated century was “a period of plague” but the show is set to prove that it was also “a period of sophistication”.

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350, National Gallery, London, 8 March 2025-22 June 2025. Lead exhibition sponsor: Intesa Sanpaolo