The Story of Siena and San GimignanoGardner, Edmund G.
History
The Story of Siena and San Gimignano
Gardner, Edmund G.
Art -- Italy -- Siena; San Gimignano (Italy) -- History; Siena (Italy) -- History
These painters and their contemporaries are represented in the four
following rooms of the gallery. In Stanza III., a curious little panel
by Domenico di Bartolo (19), with a devout inscription in honour of the
Madonna, signed _Dominicus_ and dated 1433, contrasts strongly with the
more typical Sienese works that surround it. The composition, the types
of Angels, the naked Child, all show ill-assimilated Florentine
influences. The Child in its unidealised humanity is the first nude
infant in Sienese art; all Sano's babes, for instance, are more or less
clothed, already dreaming divine dreams. Domenico was a native of
Asciano who came to Siena, and is said to have become the pupil of
Taddeo di Bartolo; all his work, however, is a kind of protest against
the mystical Sienese tradition in painting. Certain great frescoes of
his, which we shall see later in the Spedale, stand alone in the story
of the art of Siena. Then follow some small pictures by Sassetta (21 to
24), fairly representative. Giovanni di Paolo--a prolific and always
agreeable, if somewhat monotonous and weak painter--is more fully
represented here, in a series of Madonnas and Saints, scriptural scenes
and mediaeval legends. Two of his pictures (28 and 55) are signed and
dated 1453 and 1440 respectively. His Last Judgment (27), the predella
of a picture painted for San Domenico in 1445, is particularly
interesting; much of it is the usual tradition, but the Paradiso on our
left is full of most poetical and fanciful details, slightly reminding
us of Angelico's work in the Florentine Academy, but conceived in a
curiously different spirit. The scenes from the life of St Galganus (53)
are a favourable example of his ingenuous narrative power. When Il
Vecchietta turns from sculpture to painting, he lays aside his science
and follows the Sienese tradition with the rest. His San Bernardino (63)
has considerable interest, being to all intents and purposes a
contemporary portrait. A large altarpiece, badly preserved (67), is one
of the works that he painted as an offering for the church of the
Spedale, and is signed: "The work of Laurentius Petri, sculptor, alias
El Vecchietta, for his devotion." The shrine, painted on both sides with
figures of Andrea Gallerani and other Sienese saints, comes from the
same place. We may notice the Madonna and Child with St Francis and St
Dominic (66), by Pier Francesco Fiorentino, a Florentine priest who
painted in the latter part of the fifteenth century, and who shows
himself as reactionary as any master of Siena; his works abound at San
Gimignano and throughout the Val d'Elsa. Mr Berenson ascribes to him the
four little _trionfi_ at the other end of the present room--the
Triumphs of Death, Chastity, Love and Fame (4 to 7), partly after
Petrarch--which were at one time erroneously attributed to Andrea di
Vanni.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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