Pietro Lorenzetti’s three-level “Tarlati Altarpiece” from about 1320 in the exhibition “Siena: The Rise of Painting: 1300-1350.” Tempera on wood, it traveled from a church in Arezzo to the Met.
Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

Art Show of the Season? Glow-in-the-Dark ‘Siena’ at the Met Is Revelatory

by · NY Times

The magnificent glow-in-the-dark exhibition called “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a visual event of pure 24-karat beauty and a multileveled scholarly coup. On both counts, we’ll be lucky if the season brings us anything like its equal.

The exhibition is rare in other ways too. As a major survey of early Italian religious art, it’s a kind of show we once saw routinely in our big museums, but now rarely do.

These museums seem to have developed a problem with presenting religious art, as if unsure of what to do with it, how to pitch it. This isn’t true for non-Western work — from Africa, say, or Asia — which can still be spun as loosely and exotically “spiritual.” But Western religious art, specifically Christian art, which fits less and less comfortably into an increasingly secularizing public culture, is different. We may now be in a position of knowing it both too well, and not well enough.

In addition, devotional objects, from any culture, if taken seriously, make awkward demands on our attention, on our willingness or ability to meet them on their own terms.

Panels from Duccio di Buoninsegna’s “Maestà.” From left, “The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew,” “The Wedding at Cana,” “Christ and the Woman of Samaria,” “The Healing of the Man Born Blind” (obscured by a viewer’s head), and “The Transfiguration.” The panels were originally from the back of the altarpiece.
Credit...George Etheredge for The New York Times

Devotional paintings and sculptures are, by design, interactive instruments. You look at them and, the assumption behind them is, they also look at you. You speak; they listen, and in time respond. Touch them (though not at the Met!), and the touch is reciprocal.

They’re energy-absorbers and transmitters. Devotion directed at them becomes part of them, vivifying them. In places of worship — churches, shrines — you can easily sense this, but in an art museum, you have to make an effort to adjust your viewing habits, your expectations. The Met show, with its charismatic display of gilded altarpieces spotlighted against black risers, encourages you to do just that. What the show also does, in somewhat against-the-grain fashion, is give full attention to a style of art that has sometimes been assigned supporting status in the historical canon.

For centuries when it came to ranking Italian art centers, Florence took the prize, favored as the preserver and purveyor of the vaunted Western Classical tradition of naturalistic curves and spatial depths. Siena, by contrast, connected by highway to France, favored the so-called Gothic style, decorative, angular, flat — “primitive” was a descriptive term applied by early art historians and collectors.

But in the hands of early Sienese artists, what an expressive style it is. And what a complex one. Some of its ingredients are sorted out in an introductory gallery where we find three near contemporaneous images of the Virgin and Child. One is a dark, half-abstract Byzantine icon; the second a dainty 14th- century French ivory carving. Between them is a painting, this one by the pioneering Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna.

The Duccio, one of the Met’s great treasures — its $45 million price provoked considerable tsk-tsking 20 years ago but seems like a bargain now — is a beyond-precious nugget of Western cultural ore, veined as it is with traces of Constantinople, Paris and an Italy budding into Renaissance.

At the time the painting was done, around 1300, this was a novel blend. It marked Duccio as one of the avant-gardists of his day, with an edgy personality to match. It was he who began to lay down the golden path that was Sienese art for more than half a century — before the Black Death cut it short. And it is with him that we begin to follow the gold in an exhibition that offers more examples of his surviving work than I had ever thought to see in one place.

We encounter it first in the Met’s little “Madonna and Child,” then in a pair of miraculously well-preserved tabletop-size altarpieces, probably intended for a private chapel. Together they give a sense of what made Duccio’s art exceptional: emotional intensity, compositional daring, a cosmopolitan vibe.

One thing these altarpieces can’t suggest is his mastery of monumental scale. For that we would have to experience the altarpiece known as the “Maestà” (Majesty), an immense, double-sided multitiered ensemble of dozens of separate panel paintings, large and small, that he and his workshop produced between 1308 and 1311, and installed, to civic jubilation, in Siena’s snazzily ornate cathedral.

Dedicated to the Virgin Mary, the city’s spiritual protector, the “Maestà” is no longer intact. Over centuries, with changes in taste and politics, it was dismantled. Large portions stayed in Siena, while individual panels passed into private hands. Yet thanks to the exhibition — a collaboration between the Met and the National Gallery, London — we can see something of the original here. In one of several feats of restorative scholarship, the show reunites, from museum collections in England, Italy, Spain and the United States, eight long-separated panels to reconstitute a near-complete section of the great work.

Stylistically melding Byzantine bling with Renaissance naturalism, and depicting, like film stills from a biblical biopic, episodes from the life of Jesus, the panels exemplify a tradition of vivid narrative painting that became a Sienese specialty, beginning with Duccio and continuing with three younger painters in his sphere: the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini.

Pietro and Ambrogio likely trained in Duccio’s studio and learned much from him before starting careers of their own. Ambrogio’s skills in storytelling are evident in four small, tight scenes from the life of St. Nicholas, each as spatially trippy as an Escher print and as packed with sweet detail as a Cornell box. And Pietro, the older brother, delivers one of the exhibition’s genuine OMG sights.

In yet another exercise in curatorial legerdemain, the Met has borrowed from the Tuscan city of Arezzo, some 50 miles from Siena, Pietro’s earliest known altarpiece, a turreted, 11-foot-high, nearly intact masterwork by an artist who, having worked on the “Maestà,” is following up with his own more modest but still stupendous variation.

It’s basically a piece of devotional theater. The Met has put a bench in front of it. A good idea.

But, for me, it’s Simone Martini, along with Duccio, to whom the show belongs.

Born in Siena, Simone appears to have held back from joining the older artist’s workshop, and had little interaction with the Lorenzetti brothers, who may have viewed him as a rival. And he moved around a lot — Assisi, Naples, back to Siena — ending his career at the papal court in Avignon, where he buddied up with the poet Petrarch. He worked in many genres and media, always in a tensile, finespun style, and it is as a dramatist that he shines.

He’s a brilliant tragedian. In his famous, coruscating, expressively piercing 1333 “Annunciation” altarpiece — on permanent view in the opening galleries of the Uffizi— the Virgin is clearly terror-struck by the life-or-death news the angel is bringing.

And in an eight-panel prayerbook-size altarpiece called the “Orsini Polyptych” in the Met show — it’s one more example of an impossible-dream reassembly of scattered parts — depictions of Jesus’s passion and death have a weird, in extremis energy, distilled in the figure of Mary Magdalene. Dressed in red-alert gown, arms stretched heavenward, she appears in every scene, an emblem of wailing, over-the-edge grief.

But Simone did not lack a sense of humor (probably why Petrarch liked him). In a large late painting called “Christ Discovered in the Temple,” Jesus, Joseph and Mary come across as a dysfunctional modern family: pouting adolescent kid; exasperated Dad; mediating Mom. And I could point to further examples of his wit, but then I’d be leaving out mention of too many other things that make this exhibition such a feast.

As organized by Stephan Wolohojian, curator in charge of European paintings at the Met; Laura Llewellyn, curator of Italian paintings before 1500 at the National Gallery, London; Caroline Campbell, director of the National Gallery of Ireland; and Joanna Cannon, a professor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, the attractions include marble sculptures, Asian textiles, a treasury’s-worth of liturgical hardware in silver, enamel and glass; and a support team of memorable under-the-radar artists.

Lando di Pietro is one. Born in or around Siena, he was a goldsmith, a sculptor and an architect, and a pretty big deal in his day. He made bells for Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio and consulted on a Siena Cathedral expansion. On commission from another church, he carved and painted his only known wood sculpture, a near life-size Crucifix, a piece of which is in the show.

When the church was bombed in World War II, the crucifix was reduced to splinters. Only the head, gashed down the middle, survived. With its gaunt face and downcast eyes it’s one of the exhibition’s most moving sights. And it’s accompanied by two others: a pair of handwritten parchment notes found concealed inside the carving. Both were by the artist. In one he asserts his authorship of the sculpture. In the other, he beseeches God to save his soul.

We don’t really know much about the attitude 14th-century artists took toward the devotional art they made, what spiritual power, if any, they thought it held. But whether he meant to or not, with this sculpture, Lando created a reliquary — a self-reliquary you might say — and, as such, something different from art, something alive in a different —- transcendent? — way. At least some of the work in the Met’s great show is alive in that way, too, as we can feel if we’re willing to try.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350

Through Jan. 26, 2025, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org. The show travels to the National Gallery, London, from March 8 to June 22.

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