The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

Alexander VI. died in the following August, and was succeeded by the Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, who took the title of Pius III. in the memory of his uncle. Andrea Piccolomini had left Siena on Pandolfo’s return, and the new Pope was probably not well disposed to the re-establishment of this despotism in his native city. But his pontificate only lasted twenty-six days – he was broken down already with age and ill-health; and Pandolfo managed to establish friendly relations with his successor, Julius II. Like his uncle, Pius III. has left his mark upon Siena, and we shall return to him in the Duomo.

Henceforth Pandolfo was practically undisputed lord of Siena and her dominion, though he never succeeded in getting the longed-for imperial investiture. The citizens appear to have acquiesced in his supremacy. The Balìa was in his hands; he disposed of the moneys of the State, and appears to have been allowed to sell certain magistracies and offices to his own profit. Ambassadors were sent to him and not to the Republic, and business was transacted by the “Magnificent Pandolfo Petrucci, Sienese Patrician, in the stead and in the name of the Magnificent Commune of Siena.” He meddled in all the political intrigues of the early Cinquecento, with a considerable amount of success. “In the midst of the new complications which now arose,” writes Professor Villari, “he shaped his course with the greatest wariness, and whilst he made a show of friendship towards Florence, from which he could certainly receive much damage, he strove also to draw near to her enemies, seeing that the bad fortune of France was augmenting their power and ever rendering the friends of Spain more potent.”57 He secretly assisted Pisa against Florence in 1505, when Bartolommeo Alviano assailed the territory of the latter Republic, and this was the occasion of the second legation of Machiavelli to Siena in the July of that year.58 Machiavelli found Pandolfo a hard problem: “I can hardly judge,” he wrote to the Signoria, “whether he should be believed or not, because here I have seen no sign whereby I can make a better conjecture than can your Lordships.” And he talked all day with Antonio da Venafro, without getting anything out of him.

There was a last conspiracy against Pandolfo’s life in 1508. He had promised his daughter Sulpizia to Giulio, one of the sons of Leonardo Bellanti, but married her to Sigismondo Chigi instead. Induced by this slight and the desire of avenging Luzio, Leonardo and his sons with a force of armed men lay in wait for Pandolfo, on his way to visit their own kinsman, Petrino Bellanti, who lay sick. A boy that they had set to watch gave the alarm too soon, and the Magnifico escaped. The Bellanti at once fled through the Porta Camollia to Florence. They were summoned to appear before the Balìa within three days, declared rebels, and their goods confiscated.

Pandolfo had now assumed the pomp and state of a petty prince. He walked through the streets and squares followed by a cortège of Noveschi and Gentiluomini, while his splendid new palace near the Duomo seemed destined to play the part in the story of Siena that the Palazzo Riccardi was doing in that of Florence. He made and unmade marriages at his pleasure. He separated Mariana Vignoli from her husband, and shut her up in a convent, while he compelled Vittoria Piccolomini, the daughter of the late Andrea, to become the wife of his own son Borghese. The sumptuary laws of Siena touching the jewels and dresses of ladies were abrogated in favour of the women of his family,59 who are said to have taken full advantage of this dispensation. He obtained possession for himself of various castles and palaces in the contado, while by humouring the nobles, giving the public funds and offices to his friends, finding work for artisans and food for the poor, he contrived to keep all classes more or less content. “How does the Magnifico rule the Sienese?” asked one of the Popes of Antonio da Venafro. “With lies, Holy Father,” answered the astute secretary. But Luzio Bellanti and Niccolò Borghesi were not alone in declining to give credit to these bugie, and Pandolfo is said to have murdered some sixty persons in the course of his reign. The more insignificant of these were thrown into oubliettes or disused burial vaults, and left there to starve.

In 1511, Pope Julius created Pandolfo’s second son Alfonso a Cardinal. In the same year peace was finally made with Florence, and a confederation established between the two Republics, Montepulciano being restored and the prepotency of the Petrucci assured. The star of France being on the wane in Italy, Pandolfo was now looking to Spain. His last political act was to intervene for harmony between the Pope and Florence. Gradually he was losing hold of things, absorbed in a vulgar, senile passion for a certain Caterina, whom the Sienese called “the two-handed sword,” the young wife of an artisan in the Via di Salicotto. In February 1512, he obtained from the Balìa that his son Borghese should take his place in the Collegio, and in all other magistracies in his absence. On May 21st he died at San Quirico. All the shops were closed when his body was brought to the city; there was a state funeral in the Duomo, after which it was carried in procession to San Francesco, and thence quietly conveyed by the friars to the Osservanza. Machiavelli, who came with the condolences of the Republic of Florence, ranks Pandolfo in the second class of despots. He was undoubtedly not among the worst tyrants of the epoch. Especially after his return from his brief exile, his rule was beneficial to Siena, in that he secured for the State a comparatively long period of respite from internal factions and of external peace.

Pandolfo, writes an anonymous chronicler, at his death left Borghese his son with the same authority, but not with the same prudence. The machinations of Antonio da Venafro secured his peaceful accession to his father’s dignities, and an increased force of mercenaries was hired under the command of Orazio Baglioni – Borghese’s prospective brother-in-law. But the young man was utterly without his father’s abilities, luxurious and dissolute, as well as cowardly and arrogant. So superstitious was he that, at the advice of a Jew astrologer, he always wore a bracelet with certain mysterious signs that should infallibly protect him from all possible enemies. For some time he tried the Medicean policy of dazzling the populace with festivities and spectacular displays, while the Cardinal Alfonso amassed riches at Rome, and plunged into the intrigues at the court of Leo X., which the papal executioners cut short a few years later. While the brutalities of Borghese’s favourite, the condottiere Pochintesta, disgusted and exasperated the Sienese, there was another Petrucci – Raffaello di Giacoppo, Bishop of Grosseto and governor of the Castle of Sant’Angelo – high in favour with the Pope and biding his time, in touch with the Bellanti, Petroni, Tancredi, and other families that hated Borghese. In December 1515, Borghese dismissed Antonio da Venafro. “I go, Magnificence,” said the old secretary, “but only to take rooms for you.” In the following March, with aid from Pope Leo X. and Florence, Raffaello Petrucci appeared in Sienese territory at the head of a force of mercenaries, accompanied by Leonardo Bellanti and other exiles, and Borghese with his young brother Fabio ignominiously fled from the city, leaving his wife and little daughters behind him.

Raffaello Petrucci entered Siena in triumph through the Porta Romana on March 10th, 1516, harangued the Signoria – his words being few and inelegant, says Pecci, because he was ignorant and more disposed to arms than to letters – and was then conveyed in state to his father’s palace, which occupied the site of the present Palazzo Reale. The creation of the new Balìa was put into his hands, the exiles were restored to their honours, Borghese and Fabio declared rebels. A league – but with reservation of the imperial rights over the city of Siena and its state – was concluded with the younger Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Pope, who was desirous, says Guicciardini, “that that city, being placed between the States of the Church and of the Florentines, should be governed by a man in his confidence, and perchance all the more because he hoped, when the opportunity of times should be propitious, to be able, by the consent of the Bishop himself, to subject it either to his brother or his nephew.” In the following year the Cardinal Alfonso Petrucci plotted against the Pope’s life in Rome, was degraded from the Cardinalate, and strangled in prison. One of his accomplices was the condottiere Pochintesta who, when examined, accused the Bellanti of similarly intending to murder the Bishop Raffaello at Siena. Raffaello summoned Giulio and Guidone Bellanti to his presence; the first was butchered by Francesco di Camillo Petrucci in the street outside, the second cut to pieces in the palace before Raffaello’s eyes, while he knelt and begged for mercy. Leonardo Bellanti, their old father, was sent to a fortress in the Maremma and there beheaded. Shortly afterwards, Raffaello was raised to the Cardinalate.

In spite of his personal immorality and cruelty, the tyranny of the Cardinal Raffaello does not seem to have been utterly bad. He governed with a firm hand, keeping Siena in peace and comparative prosperity for six years. During his absence at the conclave after the death of Leo X., the exiles and anti-Mediceans prevailed upon the Duke of Urbino in January, 1522, to invade the Sienese contado in favour of Lattanzio Petrucci, also an ecclesiastic and a cousin of Borghese; but with no result. And in March, after his return, another unsuccessful attempt led by Renzo da Ceri, backed by France and secretly favoured by a party in Siena itself, was made to overthrow his regime. The Cardinal died suddenly in his villa on December 17th, 1522, in such a tempest “that it seemed the mouth of Hell were opened.” When his body was brought to Siena to be buried in San Domenico, a howling mob assailed the funeral procession, hurling stones and hooting, shouting that the dead man should be thrown out into the place where the carrion was cast. The friars all fled, leaving the bier alone in the midst of the police, who with difficulty got it safe into the church. Raffaello left one illegitimate son, Eustacchio, who held the command of the mercenaries in the Campo.

Francesco di Camillo Petrucci, the son of a younger brother of Pandolfo, who had been at the head of the government during the Cardinal’s absence, now seized the chief power; while part of the citizens looked to the imperial agents in Rome for the restoration of their liberties, and another part desired the recall of Pandolfo’s youngest son Fabio – Borghese having gone mad at Naples. Francesco’s tyrannical behaviour and his murder of Marcello Saracini disgusted all classes. Pope Clement VII., who intended to marry Fabio Petrucci with the daughter of Galeotto de’ Medici, summoned Francesco to Rome and kept him there, while Fabio, in December 1523, entered Siena. Fabio was a youth of eighteen years of age, excessively handsome and winning in manners, most incompetent and more dissolute than even Borghese had been. The Sienese stood his mercenaries and his unsavoury amours for about nine months. On September 18th, 1524, there was a general rising against him, headed by Giovanni Martinozzi, Mario Bandini and Giovanni Battista Piccolomini. Fabio’s mercenaries occupied the Palazzo, while his few remaining friends assembled in the house of Alessandro Bichi. There was prolonged fighting in the Campo, in the Piazza Tolomei, at the Croce del Travaglio, the adherents of Fabio raising the Florentine shout of “Marzocco” only to be drowned by the swelling thunder of “Popolo e Libertà!” Had Fabio held his ground for a couple of days more, aid would have been forthcoming from the Florentines and the Pope; but his heart failed him and, rejecting the compromise which the leaders of the revolution offered him, he fled at nightfall through the Porta Tufi and escaped to Florence. Thus ignominiously ended the tyranny of the Petrucci in Siena.

CHAPTER IV

The Sculptors and Painters of Siena

WE may conveniently begin the story of Sienese art with the coming of Niccolò Pisano to Siena in 1266, the year after Dante’s birth, for the work of the great marble pulpit of the Duomo. Niccolò’s son, Giovanni, became a citizen of Siena, and was chief architect of the Duomo during the two closing decades of the century. Stimulated by their presence and example, there rose an independent school of Sienese sculptors, which flourished from the end of the thirteenth to the middle of the fourteenth century – a school which chronologically succeeds to that founded by Niccolò Pisano, and anticipates the rise of the Florentine school under Andrea Pisano’s influence. These Sienese sculptors were mainly employed upon the Cathedrals of Siena and of Orvieto, and in making tombs in other cities of Italy, sepulchral monuments in which, writes M. Reymond, “the Sienese school reveals a very special and new character, which is the subordination of the religious idea to the civil idea.”60 Tino da Camaino, who sculptured the famous tomb of Henry VII. at Pisa and worked for the royal Angevins of Naples; the architects, Agostino di Giovanni and Agnolo di Ventura; Cellino di Nese, who made the tomb of the poet Cino at Pistoia; Gano da Siena and Ramo di Paganello; Lorenzo Maitani, whose fame is for ever linked to the glorious Duomo of Orvieto; these are the masters of chief repute in this early Sienese school.

All these belong to that bright epoch in the story of Siena previous to the great pestilence of 1348. Then there came a sad decline, as the statues of the Apostles in the chapel of the Campo, executed between 1376 and 1384, show only too clearly. But, just at the time that St Catherine was beginning her public life, Siena became the mother of one of the greatest sculptors of the Renaissance.

Giacomo della Quercia was the son of a goldsmith named Pietro di Agnolo, a citizen of Siena, and was born in Siena or its contado in 1371 or 1374. His first artistic studies were made in Siena itself where, there being then no great native sculptors, he drank inspiration almost solely from the great pulpit of the Duomo. This, perhaps, is what makes him so isolated a figure in the art of the Quattrocento; the heir of Niccolò Pisano, the forerunner of Michelangelo. He left Siena when it fell into the hands of the Duke of Milan, and went to Florence, where he was chiefly impressed by the work of Giotto and Andrea Pisano. In 1401 he entered the competition for the second bronze gates of the Baptistery, and came next to Ghiberti and Brunelleschi; his figures, says Vasari, were considered good, but lacking in refinement, non avevano finezze. A few years later, at Lucca, he carved that tomb of Ilaria del Carretto, made famous in our own days by the eloquent enthusiasm of Ruskin. His native city now began to recognise his genius. In 1409 he was commissioned to make the famous fountain of the Piazza del Campo, upon which he worked at intervals between 1412 and 1419 – going off to do other work at Lucca, and forced by the Signoria to return under heavy financial penalties. In 1416 he was commissioned by the Operaio, or superintendent of the artistic work of the Duomo, to design the Font for the Baptistery, and in the following year to cast two bronze scenes, storie, for the same. But here again he undertook things elsewhere – in Bologna, this time – and the Signoria had to compel him to finish what he had begun, which he did in 1434. In the meanwhile, he had accomplished his supreme work at Bologna in the bas-reliefs on the pilasters of the door of San Petronio – those marvellous scenes from the Book of Genesis, in which he seems to anticipate the achievement of Michelangelo in the Cappella Sistina. Giacomo died at Siena in 1438. His style is grand and austere, full of force and vigour, with a kind of rugged greatness that contrasts curiously with the manner of contemporary Sienese painters; he dispenses with accessories, concentrating the interest upon the human figures in his stories. There is peculiar nobility and power in his treatment of the nude. “Sooth to say, Giacomo had only one pupil, and for him there was a century to wait; he was Michelangelo.”61

No other Sienese sculptor of the Quattrocento approaches Giacomo’s solitary greatness. Pietro del Minella (1391-1458) was his favourite pupil and assistant, but caught little of his spirit. The two Turini – Turino di Sano and his son Giovanni (1384-1455) – were associated with him on the work for the Baptistery, and acquitted themselves creditably, even by the side of Donatello and Ghiberti. Then come two men of greater mark: Antonio Federighi (died about 1480), and Lorenzo di Pietro (1412-1480), called Il Vecchietta. The former, who is said to have been connected with the Tolomei, was also an architect, as the “grandiose simplicity” of the Loggia that he built for Pius II. shows; as a sculptor, he is perhaps the most classical of the Sienese masters of the Quattrocento, following not unworthily in the steps of both Giacomo della Quercia and Donatello. Vecchietta appears to have been actually Giacomo’s pupil; his principal works are in bronze, somewhat hard and dry in style, with excessive attention to anatomical details. Giovanni di Stefano (died after 1498) and Urbano da Cortona (died 1504), by the latter of whom are some tolerable works in the Duomo and elsewhere, are conscientious scarpellini, with no original genius. To Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502), the pupil of Vecchietta, are ascribed – frequently on no adequate grounds – a number of the chief buildings in Siena in the style of the earlier Renaissance; as a military architect, he stands high among the craftsmen of his century, and was much employed by the Dukes of Urbino. Like his master Vecchietta, he was also a worker in bronze and a painter. Of his fellow-pupil Neroccio di Bartolommeo Landi (1447-1500), it will be best to speak among the painters; his few extant works in sculpture have a peculiar combination of dignity and sweetness, which is at once impressive and winning. Giacomo Cozzarelli (1453-1515) was a pupil of Francesco di Giorgio; he designed the famous palace of Pandolfo Petrucci and made those wonderful torch-holders and other metal work for its exterior, which are only surpassed by Caparra’s masterpieces in this kind on the palace of Filippo Strozzi at Florence. Lorenzo di Mariano, called Il Marrina (died in 1534), is the last great sculptor of the Sienese Renaissance; as a decorator in marble he has few if any equals, and his masterpiece in the oratory of Fontegiusta need not fear the comparison with the best Florentine work of the epoch.

Nor should we pass from the sculptors without a word on the wood-carvers, who are among the minor artistic glories of Siena. Domenico di Niccolò (who died about 1450), called Del Coro from his work in the chapel of the Palazzo del Comune, Antonio Barili (died 1516), and Giovanni Barili (died 1529), produced work in this kind which is hardly surpassed in any Italian city of the Renaissance.

The Jesuit art-historian Lanzi characterised the Sienese school of painters as lieta scuola fra lieto popolo, “a blithe school among a blithe people,” and added that their principal works were to be found in the churches of the city. Needless to say that the latter remark no longer holds, and we shall do best to begin our consideration of the painters in the well-arranged picture gallery of the Reale Istituto Provinciale di Belle Arti.

The first great epoch in Sienese painting, as in sculpture, is contemporaneous with the government of the Nine and ends with the outbreak of the pestilence of 1348. The moving spirit of this period, the true founder of the Sienese school, is Duccio di Buoninsegna. Recent researches have shown that he was born shortly before the battle of Montaperti, and that his artistic activity extends from 1278 to 1313.62 It will be better to speak more fully of his work when we stand before his masterpiece in the Opera del Duomo, that picture which, in Ghiberti’s words, “was made right excellently and learnedly, and is a magnificent thing.” Bringing the Byzantine manner to its utmost perfection for the purpose of religious illustration, Duccio gave imperishable form to what had been more or less traditional through the previous centuries of Christian art. He is to the Middle Ages what Raphael was to be to the Renaissance. Segna di Tura di Buoninsegna, who was working in the early years of the fourteenth century, was Duccio’s pupil, perhaps his nephew; he imitated the manner of his master, but somewhat ineffectually. Simone Martini, on the other hand, followed worthily in Duccio’s footsteps; with an exquisite sense of beauty and a love of splendid decorative effects in colour, he is perhaps the most typical master of “soft Siena,” doing for her in line and colour what Folgore had done in rhyme. He died in 1344. With him as assistant worked his brother-in-law, Lippo Memmi; “they were gentle masters,” wrote Ghiberti, “and their pictures were done with the greatest diligence, right delicately finished.” This epoch culminates in the two Lorenzetti – Pietro and his younger brother Ambrogio – both of whom appear to have been among the victims of the pestilence. Ambrogio especially, famosissimo e singularissimo maestro, as Ghiberti calls him, nobilissimo componitore, is the greatest and most imaginative painter that Siena has produced. In the splendid allegorical frescoes with which he adorned the palace chamber of the Signori Nove and in his glowing altarpieces, in material beauty and spiritual significance, he reaches a height unattained by any other Italian painter of his century – save only the mighty Florentine, Andrea Orcagna.

In the Stanza Prima —dei Primitivi– we have first a number of pictures of the Pre-Duccian epoch. The altarpiece (1), partly in stucco in half relief and in the Byzantine style, is peculiarly interesting from its date, 1215, as showing us the state of art in Tuscany in the very year of the traditional outbreak of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions in Florence. The very curious paintings (4 and 5), belonging to the thirteenth century, may be taken as next-to-contemporary representations of the scenes from the lives of St Francis and St Clare and Blessed Andrea Gallerani which they include (besides St Bartholomew, St Catherine of Alexandria, and St Dominic); St Clare repulsing Manfred’s Saracens from her convent by the Sacred Host is unique in so early a picture. We may here mention that Andrea Gallerani, a frequently recurring figure in Sienese art, was a nobleman of Siena, who died in 1251. He had killed a man for blaspheming and was exiled, but afterwards returned and devoted himself to works of mercy and charity, founding the Spedale della Misericordia, which was later united to the great Spedale di Sta. Maria della Scala. Next comes a series of paintings in the Byzantine manner: two somewhat imposing altarpieces to the honour of the Baptist and the Prince of the Apostles respectively (14 and 15); smaller scenes (8 to 13), showing the sort of thing that Duccio glorified and perfected a little later. Duccio himself is represented by six authentic pictures; an early work on a small scale (20), the Madonna and Child with Angels and Franciscan friars; three Saints (22, 23); an important and characteristic picture of the Madonna and Child with St Peter and St Dominic, St Paul and St Augustine, Christ blessing from above and Angels bearing sceptres that end in threefold lilies in token of the Trinity (28); a triptych (35), including scenes from the lives of Christ and His Mother that anticipate in some sort the illustrative power of his masterpiece in the Opera del Duomo; a large altarpiece in many divisions (47), in which the Blessed Virgin is honoured under two of the titles assigned to her in the Litany of Loreto – “Queen of Patriarchs,” “Queen of Prophets.” By Segna di Tura are several pictures of no great importance; part of an altar-piece (40); a Madonna (44); St Ansanus (42); and St Galganus (43). It may be well to mention that St Ansanus, according to the legend, was the first Apostle of Siena, a Roman patrician who suffered in the persecution of Diocletian; St Galganus lived in the twelfth century, was guided by St Michael into the wilderness, and when prevented by the devil from cutting wood to make a cross he struck his sword into the hard rock, which became soft as wax to receive it and then harder than adamant to retain it, and built a hermitage at the spot. He is usually pictured as here by Segna – a young knight with flowing golden hair, the miraculous sword forming on the rocky desert place the sacred sign of Redemption. Simone Martini is not represented in the Gallery; but there is an altarpiece (51) ascribed to Lippo Memmi, and fairly characteristic of the religious art of fourteenth century Siena. A well-preserved picture in the following room (11), with St Michael as central figure, shows something of Lippo’s manner, but is not a work of the master himself.