Nowhere else has painting paid such homage to the Virgin Mary. In other cities it was enough to represent her enthroned with a handful of angels or saints in attendance. The Sienese painters multiplied the celestial escort until it became a heavenly court over which the Mother of God presides in sweet majesty. Siena also grasped at the then not quite orthodox subject of the Assumption of the Virgin into Heaven. You see her slender form rising amid a glory of angels more than a hundred years before the theme was common elsewhere. These brief hints will tell of the temper of Siena. You will not expect such a city to be like Florence, interested in facts and charmed by the human spectacle. She will be rather engrossed with the beauty of old legends and in rare forward-looking moments concerned with her own devout imaginings. She will not wish the saints to be like the people one knows, but like denizens of some divine, far-off fairyland. Her painting will not be humanistic but of an unworldly idealism. [Illustration: FIG. 34. Guido of Siena. Madonna.—_Uffizi._ ] Such being the temper of Siena, her artists, unlike those of Florence, had no quarrel with the Byzantine style. Its splendid irreality only needed to be made flexible and gracious. Siena has really no new ideas to express, merely feelings more tender and exquisite. Her pictorial reforms are reverent and gradual, backward-looking, mediæval. Her art from 1300 to 1500, as lovely within its narrow limits as the closed garden of the Virgin, has the great interest of teaching us what capacities for growth lay in the mediæval tradition itself—what painting in Italy would have been had Siena exercised her temporary might after Montaperti and razed Florence five years before Giotto was born. [Illustration: FIG. 35. Sienese about 1275. Altar-front of St. Peter.—_Siena._ ]