Such is the average of these narratives, clear, picturesque, circumstantial, infused with a generalized and never very intense emotion. There are some, mostly composed with few figures, which reveal a great fastidiousness of arrangement. In such a composition as the Marys at the Tomb, Figure 40, Duccio reveals himself as pure æsthete, as consummate master of linear composition. The motive is essentially insignificant, merely that the Marys shrunk at the sight of the angel at the tomb, but out of that motive of withdrawal is wrought through the little panel a lovely rhythm to which everything contributes—the rise of the cliffs and their crinkly edges, the contrasting angles of the tomb and its impossibly tilted lid, the reciprocal curve of the angel. We grasp in the picture a general truth which reaches far beyond Duccio and Siena, that a too conscious struggle for style precludes any complete expression of emotional significance. For this picture is as trivial as a narrative as it is exquisite as a decoration. [Illustration: FIG. 41. Duccio. Calvary.—_Opera del Duomo._ ] Duccio, who disappears from our sight about the year 1318, fixed once for all the character of the Sienese school. In narrative it was to adopt the placid and tender tone of legend, most unlike the urgent and dramatic mood of Giotto. The Sienese artist was too reverent to raise the question how did this happen, and how did the persons feel; he asked rather “How do we feel about it as believers?” The beauty of the work, then, is not that of outer reality but of revery and meditation. It never has the tang and variety of good Florentine narrative painting, but within its lovingly modulated monotony, Sienese narrative painting is supremely charming. [Illustration: FIG. 42. Simone Martini. Madonna in Majesty. Fresco.—_Palazzo Pubblico, Siena._ ] Duccio also started in Siena a somewhat worried and petty concern with accessories, architecture, complications of perspective. He inaugurated a tradition of material splendor in gilding, tooling, delicate graduation of color which remained the glory of Sienese painting for nearly two centuries. So far as we know he painted only in tempera on panel, and the Sienese generally were to triumph in this feminine form of work rather than in the masculine methods of fresco. Finally Duccio took over from Byzantine art and perfected certain finesses of highly simplified and abstract composition, a pure æstheticism distinctly Sienese and wholly alien to the warm humanism of Florence. You will find this austerely lovely style at its best in Simone Martini, and surviving as late as Sassetta and the middle of the fifteenth century.