 |
Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Mary Magdalene (detail), ca. 1490, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
Neroccio di Bartolomeo de' Landi |
| Neroccio di Bartolomeo de' Landi (1447–1500) was an Italian painter and sculptor of the early-Renaissance or Quattrocento period in Siena. By the mid 15th century, the glory days of Medieval Siena were long over. While its art from that period has been widely admired, the later painting of Renaissance period Siena has been largely ignored outside Italy. This is in part because Siena was conquered by neighbouring Florence in the mid 16th century, with the art history of the region written by the victors and the achievements of Sienese artists overshadowed by its more powerful rival. Neroccio di Landi was a student of Vecchietta, and then he shared a workshop with Francesco di Giorgio from 1468. He painted Scenes from the life of St Benedict, now in the Uffizi, probably in collaboration with di Giorgio, and a Madonna and Child between Saint Jerome and Saint Bernard, which is in the Pinacoteca of Siena. In 1472 he painted an Assumption for the abbey of Monte Oliveto Maggiore, and in 1475 he created a statue of Saint Catherine of Siena for the Sienese church dedicated to her. He separated from di Giorgio in 1475. In 1483, he designed the Hellespontine Sybil for the mosaic pavement of the Cathedral of Siena, and the tomb for the Bishop Tommaso Piccolomini del Testa. Neroccio de' Landi, stemming from a distinguished patrician family, seems to have wanted throughout his life to express the nobility of the human face and the elegance of gestures and attitudes in his paintings. He did not make use of many innovations of the first half of the 15th century, and in fact one has the impression as if Neroccio, forgetting about his direct artistic antecedents, had intended to reach back to traditions of the previous century. And yet in fact he knew and employed the devices of perspective and used light and shadow in the modelling of his figures, but he was less interested in these. Neroccio had no wish to deny the two-dimensisonal quality of the surface he painted, and the application of foreshortening and the adding of depth to his composition concerned him only as long and inasmuch as they contributed to the harmonious effect of the composition as a whole. In the light that brushed the faces and hands he did not look for a method to achieve plastic unity and compactness, but rather for a means to expose as much of the beauties of detail as possible and to make the pictorial surface as rich as possible. |
| Sienese artists of the mid 15th century harked back to the glory days of the republic, and sidestepped the realism and naturalistic style of art developing in Florence in favour of strong elegant lines, generous use of gilding and disparities of scale, which served to venerate and uplift those that the city held dear. First and foremost among these was the Virgin Mary, whom the city was dedicated to. She was widely believed to have interceded on the city’s behalf on many occasions, and paintings show her joining the Pope in blessing the city, or protecting it from earthquakes, and her sailors from storms. Along with the Virgin, Siena was devoted to its native saints, particularly Saint Bernadino, a charismatic Franciscan preacher who died in 1444 and canonised just six years later, and Saint Catherine, a much loved Dominican mystic who died in 1380. These patrons feature in many paintings from the period, as do other aspects of the city’s strong sense of civic pride – images of the city and its walls and characteristic black and white striped cathedral. This civic pride and wish to be different, in an environment where the territorial ambitions of Florence and other more powerful Italian states loomed ever present, were to shape Siena’s artistic style. The city’s art did not exist in a vacuum, however, and while there was a tradition of copying from art of the city’s golden age before the Black Death of 1348, from artists like Simone Martini, the influence of visits to Siena by artists like Donatello cannot be underestimated. [1] |
A sculptor as well as a painter, Neroccio de' Landi was one of the most accomplished artists of late fifteenth-century Siena. His painted productions centered on devotional images of the Madonna and Child; this fine example dates from about 1490. The format—with two accompanying saints set behind the Virgin — is conventional, but Neroccio's lyrical, relieflike treatment of the figures and his emphasis on surface refinement are peculiar to him. The exceptionally beautiful frame is not original to the picture but was designed by the great architectural engineer-sculptor-painter Francesco di Giorgio, with whom Neroccio shared a workshop between 1468 and 1475. Neroccio's style remains almost unchanged in his several compositions presenting the Madonna with Child and Saints. The drawing is always perceptibly subtle and light, the colours do not glow with varnish, but enchant with their unlacquered, milky opaque effect. |
 Madonna and Child with Saints Jerome and Mary Magdalene, ca. 1490, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York |
|
Around the turn of the 1460s and '70s, Neroccio and Francesco di Giorgio created together a new, blonde and ethereal female ideal in Sienese painting, of which this Madonna is a beautiful example.
This is often described as one of the earliest portraits from Renaissance Siena. While humanism and a focus on man and individual accomplishment had helped create a market for portraiture in Florence in the mid 1400s, in Siena it remained rare. There was little demand for private secular art of any kind until the last quarter of the century, when humanism finally asserted itself following the election of Pope Pius II, the former Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. A member of a prominent Sienese family and noted humanist, he was the first pope to write a true autobiography. The young woman on this panel has a dreamy and idealized beauty, accented by masses of blond hair. (Saint Bernardino preached against women who bleached their hair in the sun and sat in public squares to dry it.) Her three-quarter pose is unusual; most female portraits in Italy at this date were in profile. A slender and long-necked Virgin holds before her the Child, who looks up at his mother while blessing and supporting himself on the armrest of the throne. The sweeping outline of Mary's gold-edged cloak, sharply delineated against the gold ground, still follows the Ducciesque tradition, but signs of receptivity to the new style can be discerned in every detail of the picture. The vigorous figure of the Child was inspired by the reliefs of Donatello, who spent the last years of his life in Siena.
|
|
|
| Claudia Quinta embodied the greatest virtues of Roman womanhood—chastity, piety, and fortitude. It had been prophesied that Roman victory in the Second Punic War depended on bringing Cybele, the Anatolian Great Mother goddess, to Rome. But when a ship with her image arrived at the mouth of the Tiber River, it became mired in mud. Strong men were unable to free it. Claudia was a virtuous young matron, falsely accused of impropriety, who had prayed to Cybele for a sign of her innocence. At the goddess's direction she slipped a slender cord over the ship's bow and easily pulled the vessel free.
This painting was part of a set of at least seven works representing paragons of virtue. Such cycles devoted to famous men and women of the past had been popular since the Middle Ages and seemed to enjoy particular favor in Siena. The men and women in this set, taken from ancient literature and the Bible, were renowned for chastity, fortitude, or self-restraint. In civic buildings such cycles usually focused on men of political courage, but because this group contains so many women and concentrates on more "domestic" virtues, it probably decorated a private house. |
 Neroccio de Landi, Claudia Quinta, about 1490-1495, Washington, National Gallery of Art |
|
|
 [1] Donatello was invited to Siena in 1457 to create bronze doors for the cathedral, and while he never completed this project, the work he made in the two years he was there had a lasting effect on Sienese art. The Sienese traditions of idiosyncratic gilding techniques like sgraffito – scratching through paint to reveal gold leaf – coupled with visionary subjects and strong lines were blended with Donatello’s Renaissance ideals. Bronzes by Francesco di Giorgio show an energy and movement akin to Donatello’s style, and other Sienese artists, like Matteo di Giovanni, started to adopt sculptural ideas as well, like the carefully studied human forms and musculature of the figures in The Dream of Saint Jerome and Benvenuto di Giovanni’s image of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. Sienese nobles had been excluded from government and took the Renaissance’s rediscovery of classical culture to invent ancient, and mainly spurious, ancestries for themselves, forging their own identity through artistic interpretations of this antique age. Many works by Francesco di Giorgio, a sculptor, painter, architect and engineer, and leading figure of the Sienese Renaissance, show this growing obsession with antiquity, as do a stunning pair of cassone (wedding chest) fronts by Neroccio de’ Landi. Depicting The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra and The Battle of Actium, they served both to vaunt the owners’ noble bearing and to remind the couple of the disastrous results of infidelity. Tastes were changing, and as well as classical subjects other heroic tales became popular subjects, with an extraordinary series of three paintings forming one of the exhibition’s highlights. United for the first time in two centuries, they tell Boccaccio’s story of the long-suffering wife Griselda, whose husband pretends her children have died and casts her out into a life of poverty. Her husband’s actions are a ruse to test her loyalty, however, and through her unwavering obedience she is eventually reunited with family and status. This politically incorrect morality tale was painted by the unknown ‘Master of the Story of Griselda’ around 1494, and exemplifies the changing face of art in Siena. With the return from exile of the medieval Nove faction in 1487, their leader, Pandolfo Petrucci, helped to re-establish the power of the noble families who had been excluded from government. Petrucci was keen to look outwards and invite artists from other parts of Italy to the city, with luminaries like Raphael, Pintoricchio and Signorelli visiting during his tenure. The end of the Sienese Republic was heralded by its defeat at the hands of arch-rival Florence in 1555. Here the exhibition ends, but not before dedicating a whole room to the work of Domenico Beccafumi, not only one of Siena’s greatest artists, but one of the most accomplished of all 16th century Italy. |
||||
|
||||
 |
 |
|
||
Podere Santa Pia |
Podere Santa Pia |
Siena, duomo |
||
 |
 |
 |
||
Pienza |
Montalcino |
Pieve di Santa Maria dello Spino |
||
| Sienese Painting |
||||
'Together with Florence, Siena was the chief economic, political, and cultural center of Tuscany in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. Although only in 1559 did Siena become part of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany under the rule of the Medici, its heyday was unquestionably two centuries earlier, between 1287 and 1355, when the independent commune was ruled by nine magistrates (referred to as the nove) drawn from a restricted oligarchy. During this time of peace and prosperity—interrupted by the devastating plague of 1348 that reduced the population by more than half—the city allied itself with the papal party of the Guelphs and had contacts with the Angevin dynasty in France and Naples. These political ties help explain the pronouncedly Gothic character of so much Sienese architecture and the fluent elegance of its paintings. No other city outside Florence produced a comparably great school of painting, culminating in the figures of Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278, died 1318), Simone Martini (active by 1315, died 1344), and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (active 1320–44, 1319–47, respectively). Duccio may be considered the father of Sienese painting and is, together with Giotto, one of the founders of Western art. His paintings introduce a lyrical note and a refined sense of color into European painting, and he was an unsurpassed story teller, or narrative artist. Although his early work shows a profound debt to Byzantine precedent, after about 1295 or 1300—the date of a Madonna and Child in the Metropolitan (2004.442)—his paintings show an increasing interest in space and an exploration of human emotions. The enormous altarpiece he painted for the cathedral of Siena—the Maestà—is one of the landmarks of European painting. On the front it shows the Madonna and Child enthroned with saints and angels, while on the reverse (facing the choir, where the clergy sat during services) were more than fifty scenes of the life of Christ, incorporating urban views, landscapes, and interior settings of astonishing invention. (The altarpiece was cut apart in the eighteenth century and partly dispersed; one scene is in the Frick Collection, New York.) Just as Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel, Padua, and in the Church of Santa Croce, Florence, forecast Florentine painting for the next two centuries, so Duccio's Maestà became a reference point for all Sienese artists. In it, two strands of European art come together: the otherworldly, sacred art of the Middle Ages, and the human-oriented art of the early Renaissance. Simone Martini developed the lyrical vein in Duccio's art. An artist of incomparable refinement and descriptive abilities, he became one of the most sought-after painters of the day, dying at the papal court in Avignon, France, and famously praised by the great poet Petrarch. The richly tooled surfaces of his paintings and their elegant naturalism became the basis of courtly art from Paris to Prague—the so-called International Gothic style (41.100.23). Simone's brother-in-law, Lippo Memmi (active by 1317, died 1356), sometimes collaborated with him and was an artist of almost equal caliber (43.98.6). Each had a brother (Donato Martini and Federigo Memmi) who also painted and scholars have not yet agreed on assigning various works of outstanding quality to them. Of these, by far the most important is a fresco cycle in the Collegiata of San Gimignano. Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti stand somewhat apart from this Duccesque tradition, though Pietro (2002.436) almost certainly worked on the Maestà. Their emphasis on deep and complex spatial settings and three-dimensional figure construction derived from their close study of the work of Giotto (11.126.1). Each excelled as a fresco painter. However, like Duccio and Simone Martini, they had a native feeling for rich color harmonies, and their work shows a precocious interest in genre-like details. The deeply expressive character of their art unquestionably reflects the sculpture of Giovanni Pisano, who was active in Siena from 1284 (his last record of payment there was in 1314). Ambrogio Lorenzetti's paintings are perhaps the first in Europe to employ a single-point perspective. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Sienese painters looked increasingly to Florence for inspiration, but outstanding artists such as Sassetta (43.98.1), Giovanni di Paolo (1975.1.31; 06.1046; 1975.1.37), Neroccio de' Landi (61.43), Matteo di Giovanni, and Beccafumi maintained the great tradition established by their fourteenth-century forebears.' Keith Christiansen, "Sienese Painting". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004). |
|
|||
The Maremma | Arcidosso | Campagnatico | Capalbio | Castel del Piano | Castell'Azzara | Castiglione della Pescaia | Cinigiano | Civitella | Follonica | Gavorrano - Castel di Pietra - Pia dei Tolomei | Giardino dei Tarocchi - Niki de Saint Phalle | Grosseto | Isola del Giglio | Istia d'Ombrone | Magliano in Toscana | Monticiano | Marina di Albarese | Massa Marittima | Montecristo | Montelaterone | Montemerano | Montichiello | Montenero - Montegiovi | Orvieto | Paganico | Parco naturale della Maremma | Monticello | Pitigliano | Porrona | Porto Ercole | Punta Ala | Principina a mare | Roccalbegna | Roccastrada | Rosselle | San Galgano | Saturnia | Scansano | Scarlino | Seggiano | Semproniano | Sorano | Sovana | Talamone | Vetulonia |
||||
