The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

In the second room there is a noble collection of paintings by the Lorenzetti. By the elder brother Pietro are: the Assumption of the Madonna (5), with the doubting Thomas receiving the sacred girdle; the Madonna and Child enthroned (21), with a lovely band of Angels clustering round the throne; four small scenes from the history of the Order of the Carmelities (28, 29), being apparently the remains of the predella of a famous picture that Pietro painted for the church of the Carmine in 1329. The younger Lorenzetti, Ambrogio, is represented by three masterpieces. The smallest of these (9) is a perfect gem of early Sienese art; the Madonna is enthroned with both her arms folded round the Divine Child, who unfolds a scroll to the four Latin Doctors kneeling in adoration, each receiving His doctrine with a wonderful expression of rapt devotion, ecstasy and yearning – but each in a totally different way; the golden haired Virgin Martyrs, Catherine with her wheel, Dorothy with her flowers, are standing in attendance on the Queen, and there are six adoring Angels above. The large altar-piece (2) is a striking and imposing work; the Madonna and Child are attended by the Magdalene and St Dorothy and the two St Johns, while below is the Deposition from the Cross: the heads are full of beauty and expression, and the Deposition shows Ambrogio’s dramatic power. The Annunciation (33), dated the 17th of December 1344, appears to be Ambrogio’s last extant work; it was painted for the Palazzo del Comune and, in addition to the painter’s name, is inscribed with those of the Camarlingo – Don Francesco, monk of St Galganus – the three Esecutori and the Scrittore or scribe.63 High up on the wall above this picture are two half figures of saints (34, 36), damaged, but genuine Ambrogios. Ascribed to Pietro Lorenzetti is a curious allegory (37), apparently of the story of sin and the Atonement of the Cross.

As in sculpture, so in painting, a decline set in after 1348. In the latter part of the fourteenth century worked Giacomo di Mino del Pellicciaio, Lippo di Vanni, Bartolo di Maestro Fredi (who died in 1410), Barna or Berna, Luca di Tommè, Paolo di Giovanni, Andrea di Vanni. They are somewhat mediocre artists, far below the Lorenzetti, from whom they not unfrequently borrow motives; still, as religious illustrators, they follow to the best of their limited powers the greater men who had gone before. Andrea di Vanni is an exceedingly interesting personality; he was a man of mark in the counsels of the Riformatori, served the State as ambassador and in other capacities, and was a fervent disciple of St Catherine, who addressed several letters to him and whose portrait he painted. Barna can only be studied at San Gimignano, and the picture ascribed to Andrea di Vanni (59) is not one of his few authenticated works. But Bartolo di Maestro Fredi is represented in this Stanza II. by a whole series of paintings (42 to 49); by Luca di Tommè is a signed and dated picture of 1367 (54), in which the central group of St Anne with a very sweet and girlish Madonna has great charm; Paolo di Giovanni’s Nativity of the Blessed Virgin (61), partly imitated from a picture by Pietro Lorenzetti, is bright and pleasant in colour and feeling; by Giacomo di Mino is a triptych (90). This room contains also some good and characteristic works of the Florentine school of the Trecento; a Madonna with the Magdalene and St Catherine of Alexandria and Angels (52), signed by Taddeo Gaddi; the Death and Coronation of the Madonna (64, 70), by Spinello Aretino. The connecting link between this group of Sienese artists and the painters of the Quattrocento is found in Taddeo di Bartolo (1363-1422), the pupil of Bartolo di Fredi. With no striking originality nor any great power, Taddeo was a conscientious and meritorious painter, whose works show a deep religious feeling, and who exercised considerable influence upon the Sienese school of his day. Most of the greater painters of the succeeding epoch may be said to have proceeded, directly or indirectly, from his school. By Taddeo di Bartolo, besides a number of smaller pictures, there is in this room one large altar-piece in several divisions (76), signed and dated 1409, of which the central scene is the Annunciation with St Cosmas and St Damian, the patron saints of the medical profession.

Sienese painting in the fifteenth century is distinguished by its mystical tone and its exceedingly conservative, not to say retrogressive, spirit. No preoccupation with scientific researches, no problems of movement or anatomy, disturbed the calm of the Sienese painters; we meet with hardly any portraiture in their work, and even less mythology. These most turbulent of Italian people who, in De Commines’ famous phrase, “are ever in division, and govern their commonwealth more fondly than any other town in Italy,” chose that their painters should give them art that was exclusively the handmaid of religion. While foreign sculptors, such as Donatello and Ghiberti, were welcomed and employed in Siena, foreign painters were practically excluded until the last two decades of the century. Great spiritual beauty in faces, accuracy of drawing within certain limits, with a profusion and a lavishness in the use of gold and the most brilliant colours (this the Sienese particularly demanded of their painters), characterise the school at this epoch. Their strength and their weakness alike are shown in that their most typical painter is styled the “Sienese Fra Angelico,” while there never was, at least to any good effect, a Sienese Masaccio. The chief painters whose work falls into this period are: Sano di Pietro (1406-1481), Domenico di Bartolo (whose few extant works are dated from 1433 to 1443), Giovanni di Paolo (died in 1482), the sculptor Lorenzo di Pietro, called Il Vecchietta (1412-1480), Stefano di Giovanni called Sassetta (died in 1450). And then, following after these, a second group: Matteo di Giovanni, who was born about 1435 and died in 1495; Francesco di Giorgio Martini (1439-1502), Neroccio di Bartolommeo Landi (1447-1500), Benvenuto di Giovanni (1436-1518) – these three the pupils of Lorenzo di Pietro.

These painters and their contemporaries are represented in the four following rooms of the gallery. In Stanza III., a curious little panel by Domenico di Bartolo (19), with a devout inscription in honour of the Madonna, signed Dominicus and dated 1433, contrasts strongly with the more typical Sienese works that surround it. The composition, the types of Angels, the naked Child, all show ill-assimilated Florentine influences. The Child in its unidealised humanity is the first nude infant in Sienese art; all Sano’s babes, for instance, are more or less clothed, already dreaming divine dreams. Domenico was a native of Asciano who came to Siena, and is said to have become the pupil of Taddeo di Bartolo; all his work, however, is a kind of protest against the mystical Sienese tradition in painting. Certain great frescoes of his, which we shall see later in the Spedale, stand alone in the story of the art of Siena. Then follow some small pictures by Sassetta (21 to 24), fairly representative. Giovanni di Paolo – a prolific and always agreeable, if somewhat monotonous and weak painter – is more fully represented here, in a series of Madonnas and Saints, scriptural scenes and mediaeval legends. Two of his pictures (28 and 55) are signed and dated 1453 and 1440 respectively. His Last Judgment (27), the predella of a picture painted for San Domenico in 1445, is particularly interesting; much of it is the usual tradition, but the Paradiso on our left is full of most poetical and fanciful details, slightly reminding us of Angelico’s work in the Florentine Academy, but conceived in a curiously different spirit. The scenes from the life of St Galganus (53) are a favourable example of his ingenuous narrative power. When Il Vecchietta turns from sculpture to painting, he lays aside his science and follows the Sienese tradition with the rest. His San Bernardino (63) has considerable interest, being to all intents and purposes a contemporary portrait. A large altarpiece, badly preserved (67), is one of the works that he painted as an offering for the church of the Spedale, and is signed: “The work of Laurentius Petri, sculptor, alias El Vecchietta, for his devotion.” The shrine, painted on both sides with figures of Andrea Gallerani and other Sienese saints, comes from the same place. We may notice the Madonna and Child with St Francis and St Dominic (66), by Pier Francesco Fiorentino, a Florentine priest who painted in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and who shows himself as reactionary as any master of Siena; his works abound at San Gimignano and throughout the Val d’Elsa. Mr Berenson ascribes to him the four little trionfi at the other end of the present room – the Triumphs of Death, Chastity, Love and Fame (4 to 7), partly after Petrarch – which were at one time erroneously attributed to Andrea di Vanni.

The next two rooms, Stanza IV. and Stanza V., are entirely devoted to Sano di Pietro. Sano, or Ansano, is the most mystical, the most genuinely inspired by religious devotion, of all the painters of Siena; like Fra Angelico, his life was in perfect harmony with his art, pictor famosus et homo totus deditus Deo– so is he described in the document that registers his death – “a famous painter and a man utterly dedicated to God”; but, unlike Angelico, he was a married man and a father of children. In these two rooms he can be thoroughly studied in all his phases. His brush moves in a somewhat restricted field. It is always the Madonna with her Divine Child, surrounded by saints and adored by Seraphim, now listening to the music of attendant Angels, now crowned by her Son with the diadem of Paradise. Or we have saints, men and women, rapt in ecstasy and already of another world. Sometimes monks or nuns are introduced, kneeling at Our Lady’s feet or worshipping her Child, or the portrait of the donor – frequently (as in number 9 of Stanza IV.) some devout nun who had it painted “for the soul of her father and of her mother”; but such figures are always very small indeed, as though to reduce the human element to a minimum. The faces are always very sweet – the Angels, with the flame of the Holy Spirit resting upon their foreheads, perhaps especially so – the colours are of that almost shadowless brightness that the Sienese loved. Among the Sienese saints introduced we may notice (Stanza IV., 25) the founder of the Gesuati, the Beato Giovanni Colombini, kneeling at the Madonna’s feet; he was a leader in the religious life of Tuscany when St Catherine was a child, and the Colombini were connected by marriage with the Benincasa.

One picture in Stanza IV. (20) is unique among Sano’s works, and may be described as a mystical treatment of contemporary history. Pope Calixtus III. is enthroned in full pontifical robes, his cope being buckled with the Borgia arms, while below appears Siena with the Tower of the Palazzo and the Campanile of the Duomo; mules are being driven into the city, laden with sacks of grain marked with the balzana, the muleteer being armed and looking round in fear to see if he is pursued. In the clouds the Madonna appears, to commend her city to the Holy Father, a scroll bearing her words: “O worthy Pastor to my Christian people, to thee henceforth do I render the care of Siena; to her let all thy kindly feeling turn.” And we have his answer: “Virgin Mother, dear Consort to God, if thy Calixtus is worthy of so great a gift, nought save death shall sever me from Siena.” Though somewhat hastily painted, and though the character of Calixtus is hardly more realised than in the case of Giotto’s popes, the historical interest of the picture, which was executed for the Palazzo Pubblico, is considerable. In 1455, when Piccinino the great condottiere – in secret understanding with Giberto da Correggio, the commander of the Sienese forces, and with Ghino di Pietro Bellanti and other traitors within the walls – was preparing to make war upon the Republic, Calixtus (Alfonso Borgia), then newly-elected Pope, took Siena under his protection and sent the ecclesiastical forces to its support. He urged the Sienese to prosecute the war to the bitter end, declared that their cause was his own. “We shall maintain inviolate your own and the common peace and quiet of all Italy,” he said to the Captain of the People and the Priors of the Commune in a bull dated August 14th, 1455, “even to the shedding of our own blood, if needs be.” “You have a Pope,” wrote Enea Silvio Piccolomini (who was not yet Cardinal), a few days later to the Balìa, “most affectionate towards your Republic, as you perceive; know how to take advantage of it, for his courage is as great as his charity, nor has he anything at heart save justice.”64 When the Balìa wanted to compromise and make peace, Calixtus would not hear of it, but sent abundant grain and provisions into the hungry city. This is the situation represented in the picture, which may confidently be dated 1455; but a comparison with the Pope’s medals shows that Sano has hardly done justice to the rather striking features of the first Pope of the House of Borgia.

There is an analogous picture by Sano in Stanza V., San Bernardino (2) as champion of the devotion of the Holy Name, as the inscription, “I have manifested Thy Name to men,” indicates. Painted in 1460, sixteen years after the Saint’s death, it is less a contemporary portrait than that by Lorenzo di Pietro. All the other pictures in this room are in Sano’s usual mystical style. There is an interval of thirty years between the date of the Madonna of San Biagio (4), the saintly Bishop whose miracles and martyrdom are so quaintly depicted in the predella, and that of the Assumption (8, 9); but there is little, if any, advance in technique or development in style. But no sympathetic student of Sienese painting can ever find Sano di Pietro monotonous, or otherwise than fascinating.

In Stanza VI., a picture by Sano di Pietro (2) in the composition of the principal scene – the Madonna and Child surrounded by kneeling Saints – shows a certain resemblance to Fra Angelico. In the Crucifixion above, St Francis is receiving the stigmata, and two Franciscan nuns are aiding the holy women to tend the Blessed Virgin; the predella, however, is by a later hand. The chief contents of this room are the works of Matteo di Giovanni, on the whole the most powerful and most versatile Sienese painter of the fifteenth century, and Neroccio di Bartolommeo Landi, a “Simone come to life again” in the air of the Renaissance.65 By the former are three beautiful Madonnas (5, 7, 9), somewhat varied in type and style. By the latter, whose figures are stately and gracious like those of his statues, very sweet and winning in expression, are the large enthroned Madonna and Saints (8); four smaller pictures (11, 13, 14, 22), in two of which no one can fail to be struck with the painter’s exquisite realisation of the personality of St Catherine; and the signed and dated Madonna and Child of 1476, with St Michael and San Bernardino (19), one of the master’s earlier works. Francesco di Giorgio Martini is represented by three very small pictures (15, 16, 17) of Old Testament scenes, an Annunciation (21), and three Madonnas (20, 23, 24). We have also some interesting works by lesser masters. By Pietro di Domenico (1457-1501), who was influenced by the Umbrians, is the Adoration of the Shepherds with St Galganus and St Martin (3), the Galganus having struck his sword into the rock at the Divine Child’s feet; the date seems to read 1400, only because the latter part has been obliterated. By Guidoccio Cozzarelli (1450-1516) are a Saint Sebastian (25) and Our Lady as protector of the Arts (29), the Queen of the Artisans.

Stanza VII. contains unimportant fragments and engravings.

With the opening of the Cinquecento, Siena grew dissatisfied with the antiquated methods of her native artists. Three mediocre painters, indeed, carried on their traditional manner well into the sixteenth century: Bernardino Fungai (1460-1516), Girolamo di Benvenuto (1470-1524), the son of Benvenuto di Giovanni, and Giacomo Pacchiarotti (1474-1540), Fungai’s pupil, a turbulent fellow, whose pusillanimous, half-crazy attempts to pose as a political revolutionary are immortalised in a novella by Pietro Fortini and a poem by Robert Browning. But in the meanwhile, better masters had been brought to Siena from other cities; Luca Signorelli and his pupil, Girolamo Genga, from Cortona and Urbino, had come to decorate the palace of the Magnifico; Bernardino Pinturicchio of Perugia had been hired by the Piccolomini, and his great fellow-citizen, Pietro Perugino, was painting altarpieces for Sant’Agostino and San Francesco.

And, greater than any of these, there came one whom Siena made her own: Giovanni Antonio Bazzi (1477-1549), presently to be known as Sodoma. The son of an artisan of Vercelli, Bazzi had gone to Milan and fallen under the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, though it is doubtful whether he actually became his pupil. In 1501 certain merchants, agents of the Spannocchi, brought the young man to Siena, with which city – save for the short period from 1508 to 1510, when he worked in Rome mainly for the rich Sienese banker, Agostino Chigi – he was henceforth associated. Morelli regarded Bazzi as “the most important and gifted artist of the school of Leonardo – the one who is most easily confounded with the great master himself.” Frequently careless and very unequal in his execution, the exquisite beauty of his women’s faces can hardly be surpassed; and “in his best moments, when he brought all his powers into play, Sodoma produced works which are worthy to rank with the most perfect examples of Italian art.”66 He was a wild and reckless fellow enough in his life, passionately addicted to horse-racing, and a lover of strange beasts and birds. Of these latter he kept a whole collection round him, great and small of every kind that he could get, until, in Vasari’s phrase, “his house seemed verily to be the Ark of Noah.” In a list of his goods which Bazzi drew up for taxation in 1531, eight race-horses and a number of these other creatures are set down, and the catalogue ends – may my fair readers pardon me the quotation! – with “tre bestiacce cattive, che son tre donne.”

These varied influences combined with that of Florence to produce eclecticism; “a most singular and charming eclecticism, saved from the pretentiousness and folly usually controlling such movements by the sense for grace and beauty even to the last seldom absent from the Sienese.”67 The three principal Sienese painters of this kind are Girolamo del Pacchia (1477-1535), Baldassare Peruzzi (1481-1536), and Domenico di Giacomo di Pace (1486-1550), called Mecarino or Beccafumi. Girolamo del Pacchia was the son of a Hungarian father and a Sienese mother; he learned the first principles of art in Siena (probably from Fungai), and then went to Florence and Rome, returning to Siena in 1508 where he soon fell under Bazzi’s influence. Like Pacchiarotti (with whom he used to be confused) Girolamo became involved in plots and conspiracies, and was forced to fly from Siena. Baldassare Peruzzi is one of the most famous architects of the Renaissance. As a painter he first worked under Pinturicchio, then went to Rome where he laboured much for the Popes and Agostino Chigi, falling under the influence of Bazzi and later of Raphael, whom he succeeded as chief architect of San Pietro. In the sack of Rome he was taken by the Spaniards, cruelly tortured, and escaped to Siena in a state of abject poverty. The Sienese made him public architect to the Republic, and afterwards Capomaestro of the Duomo. There are a number of buildings attributed to him in Siena, mostly doubtful. He ended his days in the Eternal City, working on the fabric of San Pietro. Of Baldassare’s paintings Siena only possesses a few of his earliest and some of his very latest. Domenico di Giacomo was the son of a contadino on the estate of Lorenzo Beccafumi (whom we have already met in the political field) in the plain of the Cortine near Montaperti. Lorenzo found him, like Giotto, drawing on the sand and stones the movements of the animals under his charge, took him into his household, had him taught to paint, and gave him his own family name. “Domenico was a virtuous and excellent person,” says Vasari, “and studious in his art, but excessively solitary.” He worked at Rome, Genoa and other places, but told his friend and admirer, Vasari, that he could do nothing away from the air of Siena. At different epochs he imitated Perugino, Bazzi, Fra Bartolommeo, even Michelangelo; an unequal but imaginative painter, he excels in the treatment of light and shade. Two other artists of this epoch deserve special mention – Andrea Piccinelli, called Del Brescianino, the son of a Brescian, who painted between 1507 and 1525, first following Girolamo del Pacchia, afterwards imitating Fra Bartolommeo; and Bartolommeo Neroni, called Il Riccio, whose work belongs to the middle of the century, the son-in-law and chief pupil of Bazzi. To complete the sketch of Sienese art in the first half of the Cinquecento, we must add a painter who comes slightly earlier than these two: Matteo Balducci, a native of the Perugian contado, who appears originally to have been Pinturicchio’s assistant and pupil, and afterwards to have become a pupil of Bazzi.68 His work, however, shows no trace of the influence of the latter master, but is purely Umbrian in character.

In Stanza VIII., besides a series of small pictures painted for the Confraternity of Fontegiusta (1, 2, 35, 36), is Bazzi’s famous fresco of Christ at the Column (27), even in its damaged condition unmistakably divine. His Judith (29) is likewise a work of great beauty; but the St Catherine ascribed to him (32) is unworthy alike of the painter and of the subject. The two frescoes (8, 9), representing a Ransom of Prisoners and the Flight of Aeneas from Troy, come from the palace of Pandolfo Petrucci; they were executed by Girolamo Genga, but the composition is probably by Luca Signorelli. Two Madonnas (12 and 30) are ascribed by Mr Berenson to Girolamo del Pacchia. By Matteo Balducci are an Angel (21) and the Madonna and Child, with St Catherine and San Bernardino (34). There is also a Madonna (26) by Girolamo Magagni, called Giomo, a pupil of Bazzi’s, who robbed his master’s studio while the latter lay sick in Florence. Both in this room and the next there is some excellent wood carving by Antonio Barili.

The gems of Stanza IX. are two pictures hung under the name of Pinturicchio – a Nativity (28), which Mr Berenson attributes to Matteo Balducci, and a Madonna and Child holding a pomegranate, with the little St John, against a gold background (29), recognised by the same authority as an early work of Baldassare Peruzzi. We have several Madonnas by Fungai (1, 21, 23, 24, 33); five Saints by Pacchiarotti (5); a whole series of Umbrian pictures – Saints (2, 37), Virtues (10, 11, 15, 19), and a Madonna (17) – attributed to Balducci by Mr Berenson. By Balducci is also the Madonna and Child with St Jerome and St Francis (14). There are dated pictures by Guidoccio Cozzarelli (7) of 1482, and by Andrea di Niccolò (8), an unimportant painter of the end of the Quattrocento. The Trinità, with the two St Johns, St Cosmas and St Damian, is one of Beccafumi’s earliest and best works; it was painted in 1512 for the Spedale, as the presence of the two patrons of the healing art – a kind of mediaeval duplication of Aesculapius – indicates.

The long hall, Stanza X., contains larger pictures of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The arrangement being rather confused, it will, perhaps, be best to take them more or less chronologically. By Matteo di Giovanni are three smaller Madonnas near the entrance – one (12) being rather doubtful – and an important altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with Angels and Saints (36). Guidoccio Cozzarelli is represented by a St Catherine exchanging hearts with the Christ (4), Vecchietta by the interesting sketch (5) for his bronze tabernacle that is now on the high altar of the Duomo, Francesco di Giorgio by a signed Nativity of our Lord (41) and the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin (44) – two large pictures curiously lacking the usual Sienese grace and refinement, showing to some extent the influence of Signorelli. A worthless picture of the Passion (29), which should not even questionably be connected with this painter’s name, shows the Sienese school at its weakest and worst. Benvenuto di Giovanni is seen to considerable advantage in a triptych (39), signed and dated 1475; the central compartment, the Madonna and Child with Angels, is particularly attractive. His Ascension of Christ (37), on the other hand, from the church of Sant’ Eugenio, signed and dated 1491, is rather harsh and uninspired. By Fungai are a Madonna with Saints (30), signed and dated 1512, and an Assumption (45), a subject in which the painter succeeded better elsewhere. It is not easy to distinguish the early style of Pacchiarotti from that of Fungai; the altarpiece (14) is said to be by the master and pupil in collaboration; the Ascension (24), with its predella (23), dry and hard with uncouth and unrefined types, and the Visitation (31), in which the white-robed girlish Madonna has much sweetness and charm, are by Pacchiarotti. Girolamo di Benvenuto is represented by the best picture he ever painted (which, after all, is rather faint praise), signed and dated 1508, representing the Madonna and Child attended by Angels and Saints (17), with the two St Catherines kneeling before the throne – the Alexandrian of the Wheels being obviously an excellent portrait of a young Sienese lady of the Cinquecento.