‘Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300–1350’

National Gallery, London, 8 March–22 June 2025

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300–1350. Edited by Joanna Cannon, with Caroline Campbell and Stephan Wolohojian. National Gallery Global, London. Distributed by Yale University Press. 304 pages ISBN 9781857097160 £40

 

Robin Simon

 

This is a glorious exhibition, as well displayed as any I have seen. There are many remarkable loans, including a large altarpiece from Arezzo by Pietro Lorenzetti (documented ?1306, d probably 1348); the eight remaining panels of the rear predella of the mighty Maestà by Duccio (documented 1278, d 1319) for the high altar of Siena Cathedral, which have not been seen together since the late 18th century; all three portable (folding) triptychs by Duccio; the exquisite Orsini folding polyptych by Simone Martini (c1284–1344), another act of re-unification of dispersed elements; and, hard to believe, the life-size plaster sinopie – under-drawings – by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (documented 1319, d 1348/9) recovered from beneath his frescoed Annunciation at S Galgano, Montesiepi, which, when they were first seen in 1966, provided one of the great shocks in the history of conservation – and an unexpected insight into the process of creating a major work of art. There are sculptures, ivories, textiles, miniatures, jewels, silverwork and gold.

Two of Duccio’s triptychs are seen alongside each other. The National Gallery’s (Pl 1) is one of the loveliest of all works of art, of unbelievable quality, the Boston somewhat less so (Pl 2), although it is identical in dimensions and even displays on the reverse the same little handy memorandum (repainted in the case of the Boston triptych) to indicate which shutter should be opened and closed first, but which could also function as a reminder of the proportional system used in their design, in the form of a square within a square within a square (Pl 3, Pl 4).

 

1 Madonna and Child with Sts Dominic and Aurea by Duccio (documented 1278, d 1319), c1312–15 (?). Centre 61.4 x 39.3, left 45.2 x 19.3, right 45.2 x 20.6 cm. National Gallery, London

 

2 Triptych with the Crucifixion and Sts Nicholas and Clement by Duccio, c1311–18. Centre 61 x 39.4, left 45.1 x 19.4, right 45.1 x 20.2 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

 

3 Detail of reverse of right-hand wing of triptych in Pl 1

 

4 Detail of reverse of right-hand wing of triptych in Pl 2

 

Joanna Cannon, editor of the outstanding book that accompanies the exhibition, points out that these two triptychs belonged to the one enlightened churchman, Niccolò da Prato, Cardinal Bishop of Ostia and Velletri. Cannon’s chapter on them is full of insight, making perceptive connections between these works and sculpture and miniatures. She makes the important observation – related to the exhibition subtitle ‘the rise of painting’ – that they are early instances of paintings valued for their own sake: they were mentioned carefully in the will of the patron. Unlike the other items the cardinal listed (chalice, bell, cross) panels such as these were not a liturgical requirement, and they also had no intrinsic material value in comparison with gold and silver: they were prized in a purely personal (and no doubt devotional) way.

The late, great, Richard Kendall wrote his MA thesis at the Courtauld Institute on the third triptych on view here, which is in the Royal Collection, and established a relationship between its design and methods of execution and that in the National Gallery. His research was superseded by Joanna Cannon in an article in Apollo (August 2002), founded upon the cleaning, conservation and reframing of the Royal Collection triptych from 1983 to 1988, where she offered acute insights into the way in which the artist adjusted the scenes in order take account of an angled viewpoint: during an act of devotion the wings would usually be positioned forward of the central scene and not viewed flat (as, indeed, they are in the present exhibition).

 

5 Triptych with Crucifixion and other scenes, c1302–8. Centre 44.9 x 31.4, left 44.8 x 16.9, right 44.8 x 17.1 cm. The Royal Collection / HM King Charles III

 

The Royal Collection Triptych with Crucifixion and other scenes (Pl 5) is displayed a little distance away from the other two, understandably, since the latter are the subject of a specific comparison in the book. But this is a pity, since it appears to be left out on its own, whereas it demands to be directly compared with the other two, which the display and labelling do not encourage. The side scenes of this triptych, like the central Crucifixion, are of the highest quality (Pl 6, Pl 7). The Boston example, while beautiful, appears overall not to be in quite the same league, either in the centre (Pl 8) or side panels.

 

6 Detail of Pl 5, left wing. Photo RS

 

7 Detail of Pl 5, right wing. Photo RS

 

8 Detail of Pl 2, centre panel. Photo RS

 

I had not seen the Bern Madonna enthroned (Pl 9) since the great Duccio exhibition in Siena in 2003: it is clearly out of the top draw. In contrast I had always had reservations about another little panel – a judgement made on the basis of photographs – that used to be known as the ‘Stoclet Madonna’ (aka ‘Stroganoff Madonna’), with its curious motif of a parapet borrowed from the Legend of St Francis frescoes in the Upper Church at Assisi: a monumental motif in a tiny devotional image (Pl 10). If this panel is indeed by Duccio, this curious feature is necessarily related to the often-discussed date of those Assisi frescoes and would appear to support a date for them of about 1290, which would be in line with recent research. It had not been encouraging to find that this painting had been withdrawn from the 2003 show, but that must have been because it was being dangled as a possible purchase before the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which acquired it at vast expense ($45m) in 2004. But, if its condition and recent restoration are to be trusted (not necessarily the case), the draperies are far fuller and richer than I had appreciated and their modelling much finer, and the gentle swelling of the Virgins’ right breast beneath the robe is moving (Pl 11). There are some condition issues, notably in the Madonna’s left hand, as also in the case of the Bern Madonna at the right side of the Madonna’s nose, which creates a slightly misleading impression in both.

 

9 The Virgin and Child Enthroned with Angels by Duccio, about 1290–1295 or a little later. Tempera on poplar 31.5 x 23.3 cm KunstmuseumBern. Photo RS

 

10 Madonna and Child (‘Stoclet Madonna’) by Duccio, c1290–95. 27.9 x 21 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 

11 Detail of Pl 10. Photo RS

 

A relative dating of these two little pictures is a bit of a problem, partly because of the condition of the Bern painting, which I would be tempted to place later than the Met picture. But the 1290s is obviously right for both. The architecture of the Royal Collection triptych (Pl 6, Pl 7) lacks the clarity of the Bern Madonna throne but is clearly more ambitious, and the Christ and Madonna enthroned (Pl 7) shows, in the front-on recession of the throne steps in the very foreground, and in the solidity of the seat, that it is later, as does the Virgin’s soft and ample drapery.

Looking at this fictive architecture and that on view elsewhere throughout the exhibition is to see freshly, over and over, how fundamentally different was Sienese painting of the period from that in Florence: the one decorative, sinuous, colourful, asymmetrical, sitting always somewhere between the real world and the other-worldly; the other dedicated to stability, symmetrical in colour and constructs, determined to create the illusion of believable space, to tell other-worldly stories invariably in terms of the real world.

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this exhibition for many visitors will be to meet the Lorenzetti brothers, Pietro (documented perhaps 1306, died probably 1348) and Ambrogio (documented 1319, died 1348/9), who are amply represented – an extraordinary curatorial achievement. Ambrogio is one of the big beasts of trecento painting. His larger works can be decidedly confrontational although he is never such a bruiser as his elder brother Pietro, whose figures are often lumpy and his conceptions – as well as execution –often awkward, although undeniably powerful. But Ambrogio had a great mind and was also one of the supreme story-tellers in art. Merely to conceive of the frescoed scheme of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government on such a scale in the echoing interior of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena is proof of that; but to go on to paint the scenes with such originality and wit raises him to the highest rank. This story-telling side of his genius, unexpectedly perhaps, for one who naturally thought big, extended in this exhibition to small narrative scenes of the greatest elegance and ingenuity. In the Stories from the Life of St Nicholas (Pl 12), Ambrogio’s surprisingly light touch and humour can be seen in the way St Nicholas stands on tiptoe so as to push gifts of gold through a small window that he can barely reach.

 

12 Tempera on panel 96.2 x 52.3 cm Stories from the Life of Saint Nicholas
by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (documented 1319, d 1348/9), about 1332–4. Gallerie degli Uffizi, Florence. Photo RS

 

13 The Angel Gabriel and the Annunciate Virgin by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, about 1344–6. Sinopia on plaster, 241 x173.4 and 242.4 x 172.8 cm. Arcidiocesi di Siena – Colle di Val d’Elsa – Montalcino, Eremo di San Galgano a Montesiepi, Chiusdino. Photo RS

 

At a more characteristic scale – big – there is Ambrogio’s Annunciation (Pl 13). The exhibition managed to borrow the great chunks of wall (in fact, now plaster on a modern support) which carry the underdrawings (sinopie) on the arriccio – the deliberately rough plaster that acted as a key for the final smooth layer, the intonaco, upon which the planned image was painted. This was a fresco for the strange, even rather creepy, shrine of S Galgano at Montesiepi, which is complete with a sword buried up to its hilt in the natural rock of a hill (Pl 14).

 

14 Sword in the stone, Eremo di San Galgano a Montesiepi, Chiusdino

 

In the early 1970s, when I visited, there was no glass cover over the sword as there is now. I was invited by the custodian to try to draw the sword out of the rock but could not do so – thus proving, he said, the truth of the legend of the conversion of the knightly patron saint, Galgano Guidotti (1148–1181). His horse threw him en route to Siena, whereupon he was transported by an angel to the hill of Montesiepi. Now he had a vision of Christ, the Virgin and the Apostles. The angel commanded Galgano to repent of his sins, but he swore he could no more do that than plunge his sword into the rock. When he struck the ground with his sword, to prove the point, it became buried almost up to the hilt. Scientific tests in 2001 revealed that the sword and hilt are of the correct period and that hilt and blade – including the buried part – belong together. Strange things to tell…

 

15 Annunciation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, about 1344–6. Fresco. Eremo di San Galgano a Montesiepi, Chiusdino

 

Ambrogio’s sinopie were made for a scene divided by a window in the chapel, the angel to the left, the Virgin to the right. The finished fresco (Pl 15) it is entirely as one might expect: a polite angel and a submissive Virgin. The sinopie tell a different tale: of an aggressive angel rushing towards the very right-hand edge of his allotted space with a massive palm – more in threat than greeting. And the Virgin is terrified, retreating in turn to the far right-hand limit of her space at the edge of the whole composition, shrinking, almost trying to bury herself in the wall behind her. The first version of the finished fresco closely followed the sinopia for the annunciate Virgin (as can be seen in Pl 15) but that was clearly too much for the patrons, and so Ambrogio had to tone it down by repainting the Virgin in a more traditionally receptive pose. We would never have known about his radical re-interpretation of the event had not the strappato method become sufficiently refined in the 1960s that the intonaco could safely be detached from the arriccio.

 

16 Annunciation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 1344. Tempera on wood, 127 x 120 cm. Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena. Photo RS

 

The show includes another Annunciation by Ambrogio, a hefty, unusually square, panel that is his last signed dated work, of 1344 (Pl 16). It was a secular commission for the tax magistrates of Siena, the Magistrati di Gabella, who had their office in the Palazzo Pubblico. Stephen Wolohojian, in a fine chapter in the book, points out that the novel format of this panel was picked up by Florentine artists in the next century and that the scale of the figures within the picture field is unprecedented. Further evidence of Ambrogio’s inventiveness is also present in the shape of the central column that is tooled in the gold and not painted, as well as the remarkable floor that is nearly a flawless exercise in linear perspective. As Wolohojian notes, ‘This column seems to operate both within and outside the picture plane: it is in the painting when it meets the lower edge of the picture, and outside of it when it meets the springing of the framed arches above it.’ He adds that the angel’s inscribed words first pass ‘in front of the palm frond and then behind the column’. Here again we witness a controlled interaction between the earthly and the other-worldly that lies at the heart of Sienese painting.

Although the presence of different hands is discussed in the book of the exhibition, it is barely mentioned in the show itself. No doubt it is not politic to do so: lenders might not be happy. But it means that, as a result, some oddities on view may well strike some visitors. The so-called ‘Palazzo Pubblico Polyptych’ (Pl 17) is composed of five panels that have been associated with a documented commission of 1326 in which Simone Martini was paid 30 lire for a work ‘to keep in the Palazzo del Capitano’. They are confidently assigned in the accompanying wall labels to Simon Martini himself and dated 1326–7. They are displayed near the lovely St John from the Barber Institute, which is dated 1320 on its frame (Pl 18). This latter exercise in sinuous beauty ought therefore to be a guide for Simone’s productions at and after this date.

 

17 ‘Palazzo Pubblico polyptych by Simone Martini 1326–7’: St Ansanus, St Peter, Madonna and Child, St Andrew, St Luke. Photo RS

 

18 St John the Evangelist by Simon Martini (c1284–1344), 1320. Tempera on panel 41.7 x 30.3 cm. Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham. Photo RS

 

Yet The Palazzo Pubblico panels not only display different hands at work, they also show examples of a style well before 1320: the St Andrew perhaps c1315, the St Peter and St Ansanus c1312. The Madonna and Child is painted in a later style, perhaps c1324, at which point Simone was establishing a partnership with his new brother-in-law, Lippo Memmi – and this panel resembles Lippo’s manner. I was assured many years ago by a leading scholar that it is easy to tell the two artists apart because one is ‘more anal’ than the other. I am not convinced that is le mot juste, but it will serve. The St Luke also looks later and, we are told, has different punchwork in the gilding from the other panels, of a type that is consistent with the Simone-Lippo workshop: if so, the fact that this punching does not appear on the other panels is curious – if they are all taken to be of the same date; and in fact the wall label ascribes St Luke to ‘about 1326–30’. Why might it be later, if part of the one commission? This elegant figure of St Luke – all the figures are finely painted – is nevertheless more insubstantial than Simone’s own work. (Oddly, the wall label also offers ‘about 1326–30’ for the St Ansanus.) ‘Early’ and ‘late’, in the same work, or group of works, indicates (I was always advised) that one is looking at ‘studio’ rather than autograph work. Surely that is the case with these five panels – and so it was not really helpful to present them with a full attribution to Simone. Perhaps it was thought that such niceties would be all too much for the exhibition visitor to take in. But a viewer with a sharp enough eye coming to this exhibition, even if without a great deal of knowledge, will surely notice the differences of style in these panels, and I would have thought that it could only be helpful to draw attention to them.

Simone’s stylistic development is consistent and trackable, taking a characteristically elegant path. In particular, we have the advantage of possessing a clear guide to changes in his style between 1312–15, when he first frescoed the Maestà in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, and 1321, when he replaced a number of the heads and upper bodies in the same composition, as well as the whole of the Madonna and Child. The two periods are therefore juxtaposed in the one work, and it is very revealing (Pl 19).

 

19 Maestà by Simone Martin, 1312–15, 1321. Fresco, 763 x 970 cm. Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

 

Checking the ‘Palazzo Pubblico Polyptych’ against this unusual resource, it can be seen that three of its four male saints are based upon models of 1312–15 in the Maestà, whereas its Madonna and Child is nearer to the replacements of 1321 – albeit without their elegance – with St Luke as an ‘outlier’. The scholarly history of this group of five panels is, as it happens, riven with dissension and, to quote the book, ‘the key [archival] records date to the following century’ – which is more food for thought. And the payment said to be related to these panels, of just 30 lire, has been noted as too low for an altarpiece. Checks on recorded sums against surviving pictures can prove bewildering, presumably because records are incomplete, although, for example, a painted crucifix  by Simone is documented as having cost 66 lire, possibly suggesting that 30 lire might have got you one panel rather than five. The panels, one might conclude, are clearly from the studio of Simone Martini but not that close to the master’s hand – at least in 1326.

Drawing attention to the improbability that these panels reveal Simone’s own hand is, for example, the extraordinary St Louis altarpiece (Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples; not in the show) which is reasonably dated 1317, the year of his canonisation. It includes a portrait of King Robert of Naples, Louis’s younger brother, who gained the right of succession to the throne after Louis gave it up in 1295. And then there are the frescoes in the St Martin chapel in the Lower Church at Assisi. These frescoes, conceivably initiated in about 1313 but more certainly completed in or after 1317 – since they include St Louis, who was canonized that year (7 April) – all exhibit an elegance and confidence that are way ahead both of the earlier part of Simone’s Maestà and of at least three of the five panels of the ‘Palazzo Pubblico Polyptych’. Overall, these Assisi scenes display a love of complex head positions and foreshortenings and equally complex yet lucid compositions and architectural settings (Pl 20).

 

20 Frescoes by Simone Martini in the St Martin Chapel, c1317–20. Lower Church of S Francesco, Assisi

 

The sense throughout is of a powerful mind in charge, determined on clarity of narrative yet all the while pushing the boundaries of various avenues of representation. The chapel frescoes in their scale and complexity demonstrate Simone’s supple and inventive mind, while his intricate little frontispiece painted for Petrarch further reveals his extraordinary range (Pl 21; not in the show). The admittedly fine Palazzo Pubblico panels are, in comparison, pedestrian.

 

21 Title page of Petrarch’s Virgil by Simone Martin, c1336. Manuscript (Ms. Sp. 10. N. 27), 29.5 x 20 cm. Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan

 

It must be admitted that distinguishing between hands can be a rather self-indulgent exercise, a kind of superior parlour game, especially in relation to paintings that were invariably the result of close collaboration between master and assistants – and sometimes not even the master, it would seem. But drawing attention to such things brings alive the artists responsible and the ways in which works were created. When glimpses of superior quality exist within a single work they are especially worth identifying, because they assist in the assessment of the contemporary estimation of the worth of a commission. This was something of which trecento patrons were acutely aware, with their frequent invocation in contracts of the sua mano clause, which stated that the work should be executed by the master’s ‘own hand’. The stipulation was not always observed, by any means, but was in practice a sort of marker on the part of patrons to point out that they were not to be taken for fools, and that they wanted a proper job done with the master closely involved: they were not prepared to be fobbed off with an object that had been wholly handed on to assistants.

In this context we are fortunate indeed to have in this exhibition the eight back predella panels of Duccio’s Maestà brought together alongside each other in narrative order. It is especially interesting that Duccio’s own superlative hand can be discerned in what was precisely the element of a polyptych where assistants were usually employed. Having said that, a master such as he might well execute the occasional figure in a predella, in order to provide a model for assistants to follow – as was the practice in the larger-scale areas. The Temptation of Christ on the Temple features the weakest figure of Christ of all, but the Christ in the Temptation of Christ on the mountain (Pl 22), in contrast, is a cut above almost everything else in these panels.

 

22 The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain (detail) by Duccio, about 1308–11. Tempera on poplar 43.2 x 46 cm. The Frick Collection, New York Purchase 1927 (1927.1.35). Photo RS

 

23 Transfiguration of Christ by Duccio, about 1308–11. Tempera on poplar, 48.5 x 51.4 cm. National Gallery, London

 

24 The Raising of Lazarus by Duccio (detail), c1310–11. Tempera on poplar, transferred to cork 43.5 x 46.4 cm. Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (APx 1975.01). Photo RS

 

25 Christ and the Woman of Samaria (detail) by Duccio, 1308–11. Tempera and gold on panel 43.5 x 46 cm Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

 

Duccio’s hand can also be seen in The Transfiguration (Pl 23) – where the siccative gilding on Christ’s robe is itself a miracle – and perhaps also The marriage at Cana. The Christ in The raising of Lazarus, however (Pl 24), displays the same weakness in the head and difficulty generally with a three-quarter view as that in The healing of the man born blind (although in the latter there was evidently an intervention by the master in adjusting a pose at a late stage) and in Christ and the woman of Samaria (Pl 25). The three-quarter view of Christ’s head and figure in The calling of Peter and James is, in contrast, more accomplished (Pl 26) and features a fascinating little intervention (at least, I take it to be that and not a mistake on the part of a restorer) (Pl 27).

 

26 The Calling of the Apostles Peter and Andrew by Duccio, about 1308–11. Tempera on poplar, 43.3 x 46.2. National Gallery of Art, Washington Samuel H. Kress Collection (1939.1.141)

 

27 Detail of Pl 26

 

When the siccative gilding came to be applied to mark the edges of Christ’s robe the painting of the drapery was already finished, as one would expect. But the master decided not to follow the folds of the robe as painted but to bring it more fully alive where it hangs just behind Christ’s right side, and invented a path for the zig-zag gilded edge that glides over the volume of the drapery as earlier modelled rather than following its contours.

 

The rise of painting?

It is, to repeat in other words, a great and memorable exhibition, and the accompanying book is of outstanding quality both in text and design, with reproductions so good that the splendours of the original works can be amply appreciated. But why the challenging subtitle ‘The Rise of Painting’? We understand that it does not reflect a claim for Siena’s supremacy in that phenomenon, but its under-appreciated contribution. Similarly, the dates ‘1300–1350’ can be taken as identifying that half century as the period in which painting most clearly rose to dominance in the visual arts. What they certainly mark is the high point of Sienese painting, because the Black Death of 1348 brought an end to it, destroying the city’s very life and bringing about, for instance, the death of both the Lorenzetti. Indeed the population of Siena never regained its pre-1348 level until – wait for it – the 20th century. Florence recovered, in contrast, with astonishing swiftness and the rest, as they say, is history – at least as written by Vasari, who ensured that the story of European art was accepted (and still is, to a distressing extent) as describing an ever-upward curve to perfection in Florence, with other schools such as that of Venice in second place and Siena (let alone Padua) nowhere.

The exhibition and the book are notable in cross-referring from painting to sculpture, to goldsmith’s work, to textiles, ivories, and manuscripts, and the argument is that painting began to ‘rise’ as opposed to these media – particularly sculpture and, significantly, mosaics. The locations in which mosaics had been favoured, such as apses and above private tombs, were, in the latter part of the 13th century and first part of the 14th, increasingly likely to be decorated in fresco. This was a result of the explosion of church building in the period that followed the establishment of the Franciscan and Dominican orders (in 1209 and 1215), when an increasingly powerful papacy allied itself with them. The resulting churches demanded unprecedented quantities of instructive imagery on a scale that could not readily be achieved through the vastly expensive medium of mosaic – which was also far too slow a process to meet demand. Frescoes, such as those smothering every surface in S Francesco at Assisi, provided the answer, and fitted in with a desire, already being expressed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to imitate the early Christian fresco cycles that survived in the Roman churches of St Peter’s and San Paolo fuori le Mura. As several instances at Assisi attest, painters could also perfectly well imitate the appearance of mosaics when desired.

Painting was indeed rising and, crucially, panel paintings were now also required. Some of these were needed to articulate interior spaces – being erected upon screens of one kind or another – but also, most important of all, to adorn the high altar of a church. Furthermore, they were needed for the altars of the private chapels that were springing up around the perimeter of the new churches as the fashion for chantries took hold (it is the most distinctive aspect of religious observance in the Trecento). Chantries were added ad hoc at Assisi but then planned from the start with almost cynical calculation (all those fees!) at another Franciscan church that had learned the lesson of Assisi. This was S Croce in Florence where the plan of the east end, as I have noted elsewhere, resembles a spiritual railway sidings designed to shunt the rich into eternity (Pl 28).

 

28 Plan of S Croce, Florence. Note row of private chantry chapels at the top (east end)

 

Much of the rise of painting had, in fact, been accomplished in the latter half of the thirteenth century, but Duccio’s towering double-sided Maestà of 1308–11 (Pl 29) is singled out in the book as a landmark, and Caroline Campbell rightly points to it as marking ‘a crucial step in the establishment of independent paintings as a leading form of artwork in Western Europe’ (p23).

 

29 Maestà by Duccio (front) (1308–11). Reconstruction (John White, Duccio, London 1979, p84)

 

As noted above, the exhibition invites a number of comparisons between contemporary painting and sculpture, a category that includes several superb ivories. While we admire the surface of gleaming marble and the sheen of ivory, we need to recall that both were originally fully coloured, something which is, I think, hard for us to imagine, just as it is nigh-on impossible for us to think of the exteriors and interiors of our great cathedrals in full Technicolor, as they were and as were, perhaps more mind-blowingly still, all Greek and Roman buildings and statues (think of large parts of the Parthenon in blue and red). Many sculptures do in fact retain traces of colour, but these are usually tucked away in the recesses of undercutting and difficult to discern. Occasionally, though, colour and gilding can be seen in substantial amounts, as in a French or German ivory quadriptych of about 1300 in the Met (Pl 30). As mentioned above, until ‘the rise of painting’, painters were generally fully enough employed in covering these surfaces contrived by others.

 

30 Quadriptych with scenes of the Passion, French or German, c1300. Ivory with traces of colour, 23.9 x 32.1 x 1 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

 

Other works on view make this relationship between painting and sculpture easier to understand, notably a fine Man of Sorrows by Tino di Camaino (c1280–c1337) of c1330. The figure is half-length and was originally set within a frame in the manner of a painting, and we learn that Tino was at this time consciously imitating panel paintings. And so the rise of painting, led by painters aiming ever more nearly to create the illusion in their figures of three dimensions as if they were sculpture, was prompting a reversal of its earlier relationship with sculpture as the 14th century approached its mid-point. Painters had been so successful, and the material context they had invented in order to effect their revolution – architectural framing of panels, complete with buttressed and pinnacle structures so that altarpieces might resemble cathedral façades or chapels – was itself so appealing that painters now inspired emulation on the part of the sculptors whose art they had once served.

 

31 Annunciate Virgin by Simone Martini, c1326–1324. Tempera on poplar, 29.7 x 20.5 cm. Collection KMSKA – Flemish Community

 

I have referred above to Simone Martini’s extraordinary gifts and no-one should leave this show before seeing his Orsini Polyptych, small in scale, exquisite in execution (Pl 31). Its six scenes – an Annunciation on two panels and four scenes of the Passion – have been brought together from Antwerp, Paris, and Berlin. Quite rightly, it features as a culminating moment of great beauty at the very end of the exhibition, where it was initially joined in the same room, in an ingenious juxtaposition, by the Wilton Diptych, that mysterious masterpiece (since moved back to the main galleries). It seems clear that the Diptych was painted at the English court, not by an English painter, however, but rather by a master steeped in French and Sienese painting. But who was that? No-one knows.

It was a tantalising note on which to close this unforgettable show. Now it ends with Simone Martini’s intensely human Christ discovered in the Temple (1342, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool), which is incomparable.