Siena's golden paintings open unexpected vistas through quirky byways of late medieval art

Independent

05-03-2025

There's a lot of gold in the National Gallery 's major winter exhibition. Not golden light or painted approximations of its effects, but the actual stuff: hammered gold leaf filling the haloes of saints, highlighting the folds in their garments, flooding the backgrounds of painting after painting in sheets of shining gilded glow. Well, what did you expect of medieval representations of the Saviour of the World and his Mother? Certainly not the rags and hovels that Jesus and his followers no doubt wore and lived in in real life. Dirty realism doesn't appear in art for another 300 years.
The idea that spiritually powerful people are best embodied through the most valuable materials goes back at least to ancient Egypt, and permeated European art right up to the Renaissance, as anyone who has spent time in the National's medieval galleries will be well aware. By and large, images of saints on gold backgrounds aren't the most popular with the general public, as the curators of Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 observe in the catalogue.
The ostensible subject of the show is a late medieval proto-Renaissance that took place in the Tuscan city a good century before the Florentine Renaissance – the one we all know about – and was centred on Duccio di Buoninsegna, considered the greatest of all Sienese painters. The innovations of Duccio and his contemporaries were pivotal, the show argues, in establishing painting as the dominant form in Western art. It also has the almost inevitable subtext of trying to make 'gold ground' paintings more sympathetic and 'relatable' to the modern viewer.
Organised in tandem with New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it attracted large crowds last year, the show opens with a Byzantine icon, the kind of hyper-stylised Greek Orthodox religious painting that formed the principal model for Italian painting well into the Middle Ages. The tiny, supposedly divinely charged image of the Virgin and Child, which is known to have been in Siena during the period covered by the exhibition, is in a rigid, time-honoured format, encrusted in gold and precious stones, with which Duccio and his followers were, we are told, 'intimately familiar'. Yet Duccio's attempts to soften and humanise this ossified form aren't, at first sight, as world-changing as one might hope.
The Christ Child in Duccio's small Virgin and Child (1290) reaches up to pull at his mother's blue veil, a charmingly ordinary touch that is neutralised by the Madonna's blankly beatific expression, which removes the image from anything remotely connected with the everyday world. Yet it isn't long before more dramatic elements edge – almost literally – into the frame. The figures crowding Duccio's Triptych: Crucifixion and other Scenes (circa 1302-08), including a fainting Virgin, have a slightly compressed look, as though they've somehow squeezed themselves into the golden background from the margins.
The exhibition's great coup is having reassembled the panels of several great Sienese triptychs and altarpieces that were broken up and dispersed around the world over centuries. The greatest of these is Duccio's monumental Maesta (1308) from Siena Cathedral, eight panels of which have been borrowed from European and American collections. These aren't the near life-size central figures of the Virgin and Child with saints, which remain in Siena, but the predelle, small narrative panels that surround it. These are the elements with the greatest human interest, showing universally recognisable scenes from the life of Christ – though they are pretty small, each hardly more than a foot square.
The compositions feel perfectly balanced, the colour exquisitely pretty: subtle contrasts of lilac-inflected greys and salmon pink in the Annunciation, one of the most popular medieval paintings in the National's own collection, feel startlingly modern. The gold backgrounds now stand in for a notional 'sky', but they're still very much present, and the mood is uniformly serene. The crowd accompanying Christ to the tomb in The Raising of Lazarus (1310-11) all wear the same expression of measured alertness. Nothing can be allowed to disrupt the calm of the Blessed.
When you compare these wonderfully refined, yet relatively tiny works with the dramatic grandeur of the life-size frescoes of the same narratives by Duccio's Florentine contemporary Giotto, the Sienese painter feels a rather rarefied talent, one who it's easier to admire from a safe emotional distance than be profoundly moved by.
It's perhaps easier to relate to Simone Martini's larger 'portraits' of saints, because they seem so determined to get our attention with the intensity of their beady-eyed stares towards the Virgin – a figure of particular reverence in Siena; there's barely an image here in which she doesn't appear.
The even bigger figures of the Madonna and Child in Pietro Lorenzetti's Pieve Altarpiece (1320) appear a touch awkward, even amateurish beside Duccio's consummate craftsmanship, but at least they look alive. The fact that the scene of the Annunciation, in which Mary receives the news of her Immaculate Conception from the Angel Gabriel, seems to be taking place in a separate booth, suspended above the Virgin's head, is no doubt easily explicable in terms of medieval theology but to the modern eye, it gives the work the delightfully naive feel of a piece of proto-Renaissance 'outsider' art.
But it's with a series of Stories from the Life of St Nicholas (1332) by Lorenzetti's younger brother Ambrogio, that the exhibition seems to come full circle. And it took a couple of seconds for the penny to drop and realise why: the gold is removed – apart from the odd halo – to the very margins. The materiality of gold, the way it pulls our attention to the physical surface of the painting, has the effect of flattening not only the illusion of physical space but of emotional engagement. Here, the eye and the mind are free to enter the fictional spaces of these charming images with their early attempts at perspective and disconcertingly modern feeling for architecture. Rather than a celebration of 'gold ground' painting, the exhibit, up to this point, has been about the struggle of Sienese artists to transcend its deadening effect as a material.
But then, as if to remind us that art rarely proceeds in straight lines, we're shown an extraordinary slightly later Annunciation (1344) by the younger Lorenzetti in which the massive, monumental figures are surrounded by gold leaf manipulated in more ways than the mind can quite cope with: stippling, embossing, engraving to name just a few.
The strength of this remarkable exhibition lies less in its avowed intention to 'complicate' the well-worn narrative of the Florence-centred early Renaissance, as in the ways it opens unexpected vistas through quirky byways of late medieval art. There's a reassuring sense that even then, there was a lot going on well outside the mainstream.
'Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350' is at the National Gallery from 8 March until 22 June