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
Over the door to Stanza XI. is a frescoed Last Supper of 1595 by
Bernardo Poccetti, from the Certosa di Pontignano. Stanza XI. contains a
number of pictures of different schools, mostly unimportant. There are
two Saints, St Mary Magdalene (3) and St Catherine of Alexandria (115)
of 1512, ascribed to Fra Bartolommeo, but certainly the work of Mariotto
Albertinelli; and an Annunciation (7) by the Venetian Paris Bordone. Two
_tondi_ are among the greatest treasures of the gallery: the Holy Family
by Pinturicchio (45), a work of exquisite beauty and poetic sentiment;
and the Adoration of the Divine Child (11) by Bazzi. The latter, painted
for the Hermitage of Lecceto, is one of the earliest works that Bazzi
executed in Siena, and represents, as Signor Frizzoni has noted, a
certain union of Tuscan taste with the artist's native Lombard manner.
During the last quarter of the sixteenth and the first quarter of the
seventeenth century a number of capable artists upheld, not unworthily,
the traditions of Sienese painting: Arcangiolo Salimbeni and his son
Ventura, Alessandro Casolani, Pietro Sorri, Francesco Vanni, Francesco
Rustici (Rustichino) and Rutilio Manetti, whose works are still for the
most part in the churches for which they were painted. Rutilio Manetti,
who died in 1639, may be regarded as the last of the great line of
Sienese artists. But even in the nineteenth century the names of
Giovanni Duprè, in sculpture, and Amos Cassioli (a native, like Domenico
di Bartolo, of Asciano), in painting, have won renown beyond the walls
of Siena.
CHAPTER V
_The Campo of Siena and the Palace of the Commune_
At the heart of Siena, where its three hills meet, is the famous Piazza
upon which so many of the stormiest scenes in the history of the city
have been enacted: the Campo, now known officially as the Piazza
Vittorio Emanuele. It is a semicircular space, the central portion paved
with brick and curiously resembling the concavity of a shell bordered by
a stone pavement, surrounded with what were once aristocratic palaces.
It is entered by narrow streets, which in stormy times could be securely
held by mere handfuls of armed men. On the southern side of the Piazza,
built as it were upon the diameter of the semicircle, rises that perfect
ideal of a republican home of the State--the superb Gothic Palazzo
Pubblico, perhaps better known as the Palazzo Comunale or the Palazzo
dei Signori. Pandolfo Petrucci conceived the idea of surrounding the
Piazza with a _porticato_, and is said to have commissioned Baldassare
Peruzzi to carry out the plan; the Balìa revived the notion at a
subsequent period in 1547, long after the fall of the Petrucci, but
nothing came of it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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