The most talked-about exhibition in New York last year wasn’t an Impressionist or Modern show, nor did it feature cutting-edge Contemporary pieces, and there wasn’t a single household name among the artists included. Instead, critics raved about Siena: The rise of painting 1300 – 1350, on view at the Metropolitan Museum until January and recently opened at London’s National Gallery on 8 March. ‘I could spend a million hours in the Met’s weird and wonderful Sienese art show’ wrote Ben Davis, a critic for Artnet news. ‘Art show of the season? It’s these centuries-old Italian paintings’ Holland Cotter declared in The New York Times. ‘The Met’s magical show of Sienese painting is the must-see of the season’, agreed The Washington Post.
Siena lies in central Tuscany, just over 60 kilometres south of Florence. The city has long been overshadowed by its more famous neighbour, the birthplace of Donatello, Botticelli and Michelangelo. In the 16th Century, the artist and historian Giorgio Vasari described Sienese art as ‘looking backwards’ towards the International Gothic style, while Florence championed innovations in perspective – a viewpoint that, astonishingly, persisted through much of 20th Century scholarship. Yet the innovations taking place at the beginning of the trecento in Siena were undeniable, with artists such as Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers creating works full of drama, emotion and dimensionality. As the exhibition demonstrates, this surge of creativity was not limited to painting, but appeared across media, in glass work, illuminated manuscripts, ivory, silk embroidery.
Siena: The rise of painting 1300 – 1350 features over 100 artworks that highlight the creative forces taking place. Many of the works are ‘gold grounds’, that is, religious paintings in tempera on panel with gold leaf backgrounds and punching or tooling details. They could be large – forming part of an altarpiece, for instance – or small, intended for private devotion or domestic chapels. The gold leaf, which represents divinity, glimmers by candlelight, and the works were often displayed in elaborate, sometimes integral frames with Gothic or Renaissance architectural details. The exhibition points out a number of Sienese innovations, foremost among them the early adoption of single-point perspective, evident in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Annunciation of 1344 – decades before the birth of the Florentine painter Masaccio, with whom this innovation is often associated.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Annunciation, 1344, Pinacoteca Nazionale, Siena
The most famous of the Sienese trecento painters was Duccio, who was talented and successful as well as somewhat better-documented than many of his contemporaries. Thought to have trained under the Florentine master Cimabue, Duccio rose to such prominence in Siena that he was paid 3000 florins for his most famous commission – the Maestà altarpiece executed for the cathedral – at a time when a labourer’s annual salary was just 20-25 florins. The finished altarpiece, composed of numerous individual panels, the largest of which was 7 by 13 feet, was decorated on both sides, so that it could be viewed in the round atop the altar at the centre of the cathedral. Duccio’s importance to the history of Italian art cannot be overstated, and when, in 2004, the Metropolitan Museum paid $45 million for the artist’s tiny Madonna and Child, it became the most expensive purchase in the museum’s history – a record that still stands today.
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Madonna and Child, c. 1300, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Although the Duccio Madonna is an exceptional case, it is worth considering the broader market for Sienese gold grounds, which appear in galleries and at auction from time to time. In a December 2022 article, Apollo magazine noted that, in the second half of the 20th Century, there was a broader market across all price points, but today is it the rarest and most valuable works that are the most sought-after in the market. And Italian dealer Fabrizio Moretti observes that this selective market is mainly concentrated among American and European buyers. One striking example of this is a painting discovered during the valuation of the estate of an elderly woman in Northern France in 2019. The tiny panel, which hung in her kitchen, was determined to be a Mocking of Christ by Cimabue dating from circa 1280. The only work by Cimabue ever known to have come on the market, it was originally purchased by the Alana collection but ultimately saved for the nation at a cost of 24.2 million euros and will be on display in the Louvre. This points to another part of the equation: the fact that, in a market centred on such rare and valuable pieces, export licenses can be difficult – if not impossible – to obtain.
Because artworks from this period are so scarce, it is difficult to establish anything like a market trend. Often, only one or two examples by a given master have been sold in the public arena, and many of the artists from the period are known, not by name, but by monikers derived from their most famous works. That said, here are some notable and high-profile sales of works by artists active in early Renaissance Siena.
On 26 January 2012, Simone Martini’s The Virgin Annunciate sold at Sotheby’s in New York (lot 8) for $4,114,500 (including premium) against an estimate of $3-4 million. In July 2014, Sotheby’s sold the left wing of a diptych by Giovanni da Rimini to the National Gallery for £5.7 million (including premium), far exceeding the pre-sale estimate of £2-3 million (lot 17). The companion wing is in the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. No works by Duccio have come to public auction. A painting described as ‘Attributed to Duccio or a close follower’ fetched $581,000 (including premium) at Christie’s on 14 April 2016 (lot 126). And three works by Pietro Lorenzetti have fetched over $1 million at auction, with the most expensive of these realising £5,081,250 (including premium) at Christie’s on 3 July 2012 (lot 28). What all of the Sienese gold grounds setting high prices have in common is an exceptional state of preservation, with beauty, craftsmanship and quality driving up the market value.