In many ways Duccio’s Majesty is highly traditional. It shows the Byzantine horror of voids, is a little crowded. But this defect would be less apparent if it were raised on its historiated base (_predella_) with its original pinnacles above. Everything derives from Byzantine exemplars, reverently improved in a realistic direction. Duccio has dared to paint the Christ as a laddie; and not as a little old man; he has shown the soft forms of His body through light draperies; he has kept the austerity of the Byzantine apostles but has attenuated their harshness; he has worked the insipid female masks of the older art into forms of a positive and dreamy grace. One feels the tender mood of the work in the Latin jingle at the foot of the throne, typical of dozens of similar dedications in Siena: Mater Sancta Dei Sis caussa Senis requei Sis Duccio vita Te quia pinxit ita which I may rudely paraphrase: Holy Mother of God: grant Siena rest, Grant life to Duccio,—he did his best. All the sensibility of the City of the Virgin is in these prattling rhymes with which they loved to hallow and offer great pictures. [Illustration: FIG. 38. Duccio. Entry into Jerusalem; Christ Washing the Apostles’ Feet; Last Supper. From the back of the great Madonna.—_Opera del Duomo, Siena._ ] If the front of this panel shows only moderate innovations, the case is not so for the back. The two score stories from the Bible or early Christian legend, in the distribution of the figures follow faithfully the standard Italo-Byzantine compositions. Where Duccio steps in is in bettering the forms, giving grace to the draperies, and animation to the gestures—above all in providing contemporary architectural accessories, and coping with the problem of space. He also carries to their ultimate refinement certain decorative formulas which the Byzantine painters had glimpsed but not fully realized. Thus two quite opposed tendencies pass into Sienese painting from Duccio;—a rather small preoccupation with accessories and the problem of space, and a pure æstheticism concerned with finesses of decorative arrangement—in short, the prose and the poetry of Sienese painting.