The declining century produced only one robust painter in Siena, the mysterious Barna whose damaged frescoes of the Passion we see in the Collegiate Church of San Gemignano. The forms are those of Simone Martini, the compositions even more sparse than his, denuded of all accessories, and powerfully impressive for this reason. The mood is brusque and tragic, with nothing of Sienese sweetness. Barna seems a kind of provincial Giotto misplaced and unrealized in the Sienese country. In the fresco of the Transfiguration, Figure 56, he rises to sublimity. Fra Angelico will merely repeat him in San Marco sixty years later. Vasari tells us that Barna died from a fall from his painting scaffold in 1381, and that he was then young. If so, his originality was tremendous, for he cleared away ruthlessly all the delightful but trivial stage furniture so diligently collected by Duccio and the Lorenzetti. Modern criticism ascribes to him several panels, and I venture to add to the list the simple and stately Marriage of St. Catherine in the Boston Museum of Art. Certainly it is one of the most serious creations of the period. The type of the Christ and the concise and characterful arrangement seem to mark it as a fine Barna. The base is interesting, representing the composing of a blood feud, and Miracles of St. Michael and St. Margaret. While the simple pattern continues the tradition of Simone, Barna avoids Simone’s linear grace-notes. The finical element of the predecessor yields to a kind of realism. Barna is really the critic of the Sienese school. He silently insists that one may be decorative without too much artifice, and dramatic without overtaxing the stage carpenter, a very solitary and elevated spirit, to whom full justice has not yet been done.

Most remarkable among the works inspired by the Lorenzetti is the coarsely effective Triumph of Death, Figure 57. in the famous cemetery cloister, Campo Santo, at Pisa. It represents the hazards of the mortal life in view of certain death and judgment. At the left a royal hunting party is stopped short by the sight and stench of three festering bodies in coffins. The Hermit, Saint Macarius, points the obvious lesson that kings and lords and fair ladies will turn to dust. In the centre, miserable folk beckon and cry to Death to descend and put them out of their distress. The harridan death ignores the prayer and flies over a pile of corpses towards a gay garden party. Death loves to cut down the young and gay and happy, leaving the old and crippled to prolonged sorrow. In the upper left hand corner you have monks going about their quiet pursuits. The whole adjoining fresco is given up to the lives of such desert saints. At the upper right are angels and fiends struggling for little nude forms that represent human souls. This motive is a sort of overflow from a picture of the Last Judgment. The grim moral of the three pictures is that the worldly life is one of mortal peril, which may best be avoided by renouncing the world and joining a monastic order. The work was completed about 1375, is in the rougher following of the Lorenzetti, and has been famous ever since it was painted on the cloister wall. Entirely Sienese in its conception, in its ruggedness it transcends the usual softness of the school. It is the last significant work of the 14th century.

Siena passed into the fifteenth century without greatly changing her art. In the work of such traditional figures as Taddeo Bartoli one may observe a certain coarsening of the tradition. Mere splendor tends to replace the old delicacy, narrative painting becomes ever more complicated and confused. The latter tendency is manifested in frescoes which Domenico di Bartolo painted, between 1440 and 1443 for the Hospital of the Scala, Figure 58. Their crowded picturesqueness grows legitimately out of the Lorenzettian tradition, as does the elaboration of architectural accessories. But the work also implies a certain knowledge of the current Florentine discoveries in linear perspective and in architecture. A small ingenuity runs pretty wild in these decorations, valuable as they are in picturing the times.

About the time these frescoes were designed, a renovation of Sienese painting was being made along divergent lines by Stefano di Giovanni, nicknamed Sassetta,^[25] and by the eager eccentric, Giovanni di Paolo. In both cases we have a reactionary reform. Sassetta restudies devoutly Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti, infusing his own tender mysticism both into decoration and narrative. In a manner he combines the two great currents of Siena’s past. We may best approach him through the triptych of the Birth of the Virgin in the Collegiate church at Asciano, Figure 59. It is his earliest work painted not much later than 1428 when, being thirty-five years old, he joined the Painters’ Guild. The picture is conceived in the strictest Lorenzettian fashion, the frame being treated as the front or extension of the painted architecture. Aside from this carefully constructed setting, with its successive spaces, the casual and familiar distribution of the figures suggests strongly Pietro Lorenzetti. But the rich accessories in Sassetta’s hands are delicately selected, the humble gestures have an artless grace, the secondary figures such as the brocaded handmaid entering from the rear are fascinating in their own right. An air of alert gentleness runs through the picture. It is shared by persons of all ages. Such episodes as the chatting of two old men before a respectfully listening urchin add nothing to the story but strongly reinforce the faery charm of the whole. Winsomeness has supplanted the monumental quality of the older school. Above in the side gables are the scenes of the passing of the Virgin’s soul and her funeral procession, both conceived in the manner of the Lorenzetti. But the familiar forms are singularly animated by a new spirit of tenderness. By a paradox these little stories are really more like Duccio than any intervening work.

Sassetta painted seven years on his masterpiece, the now scattered ancona for the Franciscan Church at Borgo San Sepolcro. The central panel was a St. Francis in ecstacy, now in Bernard Berenson’s collection. On the back were eight of the legends of the “Fioretti.” The panel was finished in 1444. Especially delightful is the panel at Chantilly which represents St. Francis’s mystical betrothal with Poverty, Figure 60. This scene is before Monte Amiata, spaced off from the group by checkerboard fields. The maidens, Chastity and Obedience, sway lily-like beside their more resolute sister, Poverty, upon whose timidly offered hand the little saint firmly fixes a ring. Above, the celestial trio rises over the mountain line, Poverty turning a regretful face to her humble bridegroom. The simple pattern with its swaying lines derives from Simone Martini, but there is none of his petulant superiority in it, none of his nervousness. The realm is not the airless heights of a pure æstheticism but a very human dreamland. Again Duccio at his best is the closest analogy. Bernard Berenson in his admirable little book A Painter of the Franciscan Legend well describes the technical perfection of such work as this. It is conceived in “outlines which have in themselves an energy and vitality, that, whether they are representative or calligraphic, give off values of movement, and values of movement have the power to suggest the unembodied, life unclogged by matter, something in brief that comes close to the utmost limits of what visual art can do to evoke spirit.”

Apart from these sublimated reveries of Sassetta which express themselves in utmost delicacy of line, hue, and touch, he had a refreshing, drastic, almost a humorous side, which may be exemplified in a Temptation of St. Antony, Figure 61, in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. Beside his coral-red hut in a desert bounded by a wood that seems the world’s end, the Saint starts away from a demure and very plain little girl. He is perplexed, divining rather than seeing the tiny bats’ wings which mark her as a demon. The horizon is so curved that one almost feels the old earth swinging unconcernedly beneath this dilemma. A picture full of grotesque and authentic imagination, most true to the hobgoblin tradition of the expiring Middle Ages.

Sassetta died in 1450, and his two long-lived pupils, Sano di Pietro (1406–1481) and Giovanni di Paolo, (1403–1482) kept something of his influence alive for still thirty years.

Sano needs few words. He took nothing from his master but certain formal patterns, fine gilding and blithe colors. He repeats himself tediously, there are over fifty of his panels in the Siena Academy alone, yet is so genuine and unpretending that one forgets his lack of delicacy and insight. A little Coronation of the Virgin, at New Haven, may sufficiently represent his decorative phase. It is a nosegay of fair colors on burnished gold. In narrative painting he is Lorenzettian without the finesse of his master. At least he helped prolong a lovely tradition beyond its natural term, and that is his chief merit. “A famous painter and a man wholly dedicated to God”—(Pictor famosus et homo lotus deditus Deo)—we read in his death notice. Siena knew how to appreciate a traditionalist.

Giovanni di Paolo, on the contrary, suffered not from deficient originality but from its excess. He selects restlessly from the older pictures. You will find pure Duccian figures in his paintings of the fifties. He studies the sparse decorative perfections of Simone Martini and exaggerates their nervousness. He drives expression into caricature, seeks strength in distortion, was the post-impressionist of his day. His extravagance is unpleasing in his larger pieces, but is piquant enough in his numerous small panels. One of a pair in English private possession shows the Youthful St. John jauntily setting off for the desert, with a quite cubistic treatment, Figure 62, of the lines of the fields. The motive is still more ingeniously employed in one of a remarkable set of pictures belonging to Mr. Martin Ryerson of Chicago. Giovanni’s predilection for distortion and grimace is shown in The Baptism of Christ, a pendant to the story of the youthful John, both being parts of one predella.

Giovanni died in 1482 at the advanced age of seventy-nine, having faithfully preserved the old Gothic tradition while making it a vehicle of his own resolute eccentricity.

The slight concession which Siena made to the Renaissance was inaugurated by Lorenzo Vecchietta, active from about 1440 to 1480. He was primarily a sculptor and his silver altar-back was deemed worthy, in 1506, to displace the great Majesty of Duccio from the high altar of the Cathedral. Vecchietta chiefly shows the effect of his studies as architect and sculptor in a severe regard for anatomy, and in the Renaissance character of his architectural settings. He painted for the Cathedral of Pienza a majestic Assumption, his masterpiece. There are numerous frescoes by him at Siena; he is perhaps most agreeable in little stories elaborately set amid rich architecture, but he lacks the sprightliness of the true narrative tradition. “He was a melancholy and solitary person,” writes Vasari, “and always sunk in thought.” He did something to give to the Sienese painting of the end of the century a new and complicating thoughtfulness.

Far the most versatile painter at Siena in the second half of the fifteenth century was Matteo di Giovanni.^[26] He was not a native, but born about 1430 at Borgo San Sepolcro in upper Umbria. There he worked for a time with that stern realist Piero della Francesca. Thus Matteo brought to Siena better training than his fellows had, but he soon fell contentedly into the ways of the place. His madonnas and female saints have a new touch. They are more girlish and fragile than their predecessors, more exquisite, more fashionable. The type is represented in dozens of panels of which Enthroned Saint Barbara, at Saint Domencio, dated 1477, Figure 63, is a fine example.

In such work Matteo continues the tradition of Sassetta along somewhat superficial lines of prettiness. He is far more original in the several versions of the Massacre of the Innocents, in which seeking a maximum of intensity he achieves only a very interesting sort of caricature. The picture at S. Agostino, Figure 64, dated 1482, is perhaps the best of the group. We are in the realm of the grisly fairy tale, at an ogre’s sports. The crowding, tumult, ornate architecture are simply Matteo’s attempts to refurbish the old Lorenzettian tradition. His real quality best appears in the outlines prepared for the figure decoration of the pavement of the Cathedral. In general his is an engaging but entirely undisciplined talent, oscillating after the fashion of the moment, alike in Florence and Siena, between mere prettiness and sheer restlessness. He died in 1495, Michelangelo’s star being already in the ascendent over neighboring Florence.

A kind of petrification of the traditional charm of Siena is in the work of Benvenuto di Giovanni, scholar of Sassetta. He cultivates a resplendent impassivity, is severe without much background of knowledge. His stiffness is gracious enough, like that of an aristocrat who maintains amid difficulties the dignity of an older school. His sense of formal pattern and skill in modeling in a very blond key may be enjoyed in his versions of the favorite theme of the Assumption. One of the best of these, dated at the end of the century in the year 1498, is in the Metropolitan Museum, Figure 65. Benvenuto was born in 1436 and died about 1518. He might, had he chosen, have studied the whole realistic development from Fra Angelico to Leonardo da Vinci, but his painting keeps a chill virginal quality quite apart from life, its problems and allurements.

His son Girolamo continued the manner with less monumentality until his death in 1524. To his early activity belongs the delightful salver, Love Bound by Maidens, Figure 66, in the Jarves Collection at New Haven. It is merely the tray on which the gifts were presented to a young mother during the visits of congratulation. It was painted for some member of the famous Piccolomini family, presumably about the year 1500. The stern maidens who are plucking and binding the stripling Love, doubtless are personifications of Chastity, Temperance and the like. In the middle distance a knight rides off free to adventure since Love is safely bound. It is an odd theme for a gift to a young bride and mother, but the Italians never required consistency in their compliments. The daintiness of the treatment is typical for Renaissance painting at Siena, which never assumes a robust or realistic or humanistic accent.

There is a refinement which is the harbinger of death. It appears in Siena in the person of Neroccio di Landi. He sublimates the style of his great predecessors, Simone and Sassetta, adding freely the more delicate ornamentation of the Renaissance. There is a peculiar pallor in his coloring and tension in his modelling. It is an art of nerves and ecstasies, wholly etherial. An admirable Annunciation in the Jarves Collection at New Haven shows the rich setting, the odd blend of precision with a languor that marks Neroccio as true grandson of Simone Martini. There are many little panels of Madonnas with saints of amber translucency. They have the startling vividness and irreality of an hallucination. And there is a portrait of a girl in the Widener Collection, Figure 67, which is of a superlatively delicate prettiness. Neroccio was born in 1447 and died in 1500. With him passed the special fragrance of Sienese art.

Until 1475, Neroccio was in partnership with one whose ambition went far to destroy what Neroccio and Siena stood for. Francesco di Giorgio was born in 1439. With an ambition and resolution wholly un-Sienese, he mastered the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture and engineering. He met Leonardo da Vinci at Pavia, worked for the tyrants of Milan, competed for the façade of the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Flower at Florence. As architect and engineer it appears that he became a cosmopolitan, in painting it was hardly so. He is most delightful in his early phase which is represented by a bride-chest in the Wheelwright collection, Boston. It represents Prince Paris insolently appraising the charms of the rival goddesses, and at the right riding Troywards in disregard of the despair of forsaken Œnone. The classical theme is tinged with mediævalism, naturalized as Sienese. Later pictures, such as The Nativity, Figure 68, in the Sienese gallery, show Francesco uneasy, twisting his figures for grace and display of knowledge, working over the old landscape formulas in a semi-realistic sense, adding classical architecture, generally trying to break the bounds of the old idealism. The result is restlessness or at best an ambiguous charm. Siena is beginning to regret her isolation, to make vain efforts to overtake the tide of humanistic realism, to envy Florence, and even Perugia and Cortona. From the point of view of the Renaissance she was two generations behind, and no longer indifferent to the fact.

Not merely Francesco di Giorgio tries to do in a decade the work of a century, but such younger contemporaries as Fungai and Pacchiarotti look to Florence or Umbria. Siena was given no time to reconstruct, and her old beautiful art could not readily assume new forms. Siena never assimilated the Renaissance. It invaded her, killed her native art and substituted one without local flavor. Before Francesco di Giorgio died, in 1502, he had seen Luca Signorelli called to Siena and the clever decorator Pintorricchio. Siena no longer trusted her own artists. Francesco probably took little note of the advent in 1501, of a young Piedmontese painter, Antonio Bazzi,^[27] nicknamed Sodoma, yet with Sodoma remained what little future there was in Sienese painting.

Sodoma brought to Siena the knowledge of Leonardo da Vinci, the new draughtsmanship in light and shade. He assimilated the sensibility of Siena but coarsened it. No painter of the time was more overtly sentimental. His famous St. Sebastian at Florence tells all that need be known about him,—his considerable skill, his exaggerated pathos, his clever use of poise and balance, his sober modern tonalities. His sentimental power is at its height in the fresco at S. Domenico, Siena, which represents S. Catherine swooning at the vision of her lover, the Christ, Figure 69. Sodoma worked indefatigably in and about Siena till 1549. The few local painters of a progressive sort, Domenico Beccafumi, Girolamo del Pacchia, either directly imitate Sodoma or draw from similar alien sources. The only man of genius Siena produced in these years, Baldassare Peruzzi (1481–1536), soon went to Rome where in architecture he held his own with all comers, whereas in painting he became a modest imitator of Raphael.

In the ten years after 1500 the old art perished. Siena from being the last radiant exemplar of the glory of the mediæval spirit sunk to the estate of a fourth class station of the Renaissance. Her idealism could not bear the test of reality. Her domain had been that of legend and fairy tale and dream, she had ruled it exquisitely for two centuries until sheer taste had absorbed her little strength. She had left unforgettable records of her most precious feelings, but little record of her outer activities. Think how portraits abound in Florentine and Venetian art after 1450! There are practically none at Siena. So it would be futile to go to Siena for a greater understanding of the active life. But if you would requicken the sense of legend, live over again the tenderness mankind has ever felt for the beautiful past, hear some faint blowing of the horns of elfland—if you want this experience, then go to The gracious City of the Virgin and you shall find fulfilled the generous motto over her main portal—Siena will open her heart wide to thee.

A Sonnet to the Spendthrift Club

How Venus Fared in Siena

Ghiberti, in his commentaries (ed. Frey, Berlin 1886, p. 57 ff.) tells how a marble Venus, bearing the name of Lysippus was dug up at Siena.

“I saw it only as drawn by a very great painter of the city of Siena, who was called Ambrogio Lorenzetti. This drawing was kept with greatest care by a very old Carthusian. This brother was a goldsmith, and his father, and was a designer and delighted greatly in the art of sculpture; and he began to tell me how that statue was discovered as they were making an excavation where now are the houses of the Malavolti; how all those instructed and versed in the art of sculpture, with the goldsmiths and painters ran to see this so marvellous and artistic statue. Every one praised it greatly, and also the great painters who then were in Siena—to every one it seemed absolutely perfect. And with all honors they set it upon their fountain, as a most splendid thing. All gathered to place it with greatest rejoicing and honor and they fixed it magnificently upon that fountain, which statue reigned there but passingly.”

“For as the city had many adversities in the war with the Florentines, and the flower of the citizenry were assembled in council, a citizen rose and spoke about the statue in this tenor: ‘Gentlemen and citizens, having considered that since we have found this statue it has always gone wrong with us, and considering that idolatry is forbidden by our faith, we must believe of all the adversities which we have that God sends them for our errors. And behold in truth that since we have honored this statue we have always gone from bad to worse. I am certain that so long as we keep it in our territory it will always go wrong with us. As a councillor I would advise that it be taken down and shattered and split up and be sent to be buried on the soil of the Florentines.’

“Unanimously they confirmed the words of their citizen and put them in execution, and the statue was buried upon our soil.”

A Procession on the Completion of Duccio’s Majesty

“On the day that it was carried to the Duomo the shops were shut; and the Bishop bade a goodly and devout company of priests and friars should go in solemn procession, accompanied by the Nine Magistrates and all the officers of the Commune and all the people; all the most worthy followed close upon the picture, according to their degree, with lights burning in their hands; and then behind them came the women and children with great devotion. And they accompanied the said picture as far as the Duomo, making procession round the Campo as is the use, all the bells sounding joyously for devotion of so noble a picture as is this. And all that day they offered up prayers, with great alms to the poor, praying God and His Mother who is our advocate, that he may defend us in His infinite mercy from all adversity and all evil, and that He may keep us from the hands of traitors and enemies of Siena.”

Translated in Edmund G. Gardiner’s The Story of Siena, p. 178, from the Anonymous contemporary chronicler published by A. Lisini in Notizie di Duccio.

“Master Pietro, son of the late Lorenzetto, who was of Siena, solemnly and willingly promises and agrees with the venerable Father Guido, by God’s grace Bishop of Arezzo, who stipulates in the name and stead of the people of St. Mary of Arezzo—to paint a panel of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ... in the centre of which panel shall be a likeness of the Virgin Mary with her Son and with four side figures according to the wish of the aforesaid Lord Bishop, working in the backgrounds of these figures with finest gold leaf, 100 leaves to a florin, ... and the other ornaments of silver and of best and choicest colors; and using in these five figures best ultramarine blue; and in the other adjoining and surrounding spaces (panels) of this picture to be painted likenesses of prophets and saints, according to the wish of this Lord Bishop, with good and choice colors.”

“It must be six braccia long and five braccia high in the middle, apart from two columns each a half braccia wide, and in each should be six figures worked with the aforesaid gold, and the work shall be approved by this Lord Bishop....”

“And he [Pietro Lorenzetti] must begin this work according to the wish of this Lord Bishop, immediately after the wooden panel shall have been made, and must continue in this work until the completion of this picture, not undertaking any other work &c. And therefore the said Lord Bishop Guido promises to have given and assigned to him the panel made of wood; and to pay him for his wages for the picture and for colors, gold and silver one hundred and sixty Pisan lire; that is the third part at the beginning of the work, the third part at the middle of the work, and the remaining third part when the work is finished and complete &c.”

“Done in the church of the Holy Angels in Arcalto outside of and next to the cemetery.”

Translated and slightly abridged from Borghesi and Banchi, Nuovi Documenti per la Storia dell’ Arte Senese, (Doc. 6, p. 10) Siena, 1898.

This contract well illustrates the elaborateness and strictness of such agreements. It may be compared with the picture itself (Fig. 46). Apparently the artist persuaded the Bishop to give up the plan of twelve prophets and saints on two side pilasters, and made instead a greater number (15) of figures in the upper arcade and pinnacles.