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Sienese painting at the London National Gallery
Contemporary Review, Winter, 2007 by Donald Bruce
'RENAISSANCE' is so vague a term that trying to date its period precisely is idle. The exhibition, Painting in Renaissance Siena at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, 1988-9, covered the years from 1420 to 1500, which brought in the supreme Sienese master, Sassetta, but paid scant attention to his near-equal, the Griselda Master. The National Gallery's current exhibition (24 October 2007-13 January 2008), Renaissance Siena: Art for a City begins at about 1460 and continues to 1530, which excludes Sassetta and avoids any contention about how many of the scenes from the life of St Anthony of Egypt are Sassetta's own work. In compensation, the three pictures from which the Griselda Master takes his title are restored from the gallery's reserve collection, where they have pined for far too long. In addition, four floors above the exhibition there is a delectable row of Sassetta's pictures of the life of St Francis, including one in which he shakes hands with a wolf that has promised to amend its behaviour.
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The Sienese claimed close bonds with the Blessed Virgin Mary. In times of crisis they placed themselves under her protection by leaving the keys of the city on her altar, as they did in a ceremony before the Battle of Porto Camollia painted by Domenico Beccafumi (Devonshire Collection, Chats-worth House, Derbyshire). The introductory picture by Sano di Pietro in the exhibition is of the Virgin's protection of Siena. Distressed that her dear city had recently suffered an incursion by Neapolitan mercenaries, she raises an admonitory finger over the towers of a miniature Siena, telling the Borgia Pope Callixtus III to safeguard its gates, through which an elfin muletrain carries sacks of grain to the crowded city. Callixtus listens attentively, instantly raising his finely gloved hand in blessing (Siena Pinacoteca).
In a letter of 1873 the Welsh painter Sir Edward Burne-Jones announced that Siena had won his heart and even went on to quote Ruskin's intemperate statement that Siena was worth fifty times Florence. One can see why Burne-Jones was enamoured with fifteenth-century Sienese painting. It was almost self-love, since its painting had the daintiness, finish and fantasy of his own at its best. It also had his failings: languor, inanimation and a lack of vigour. Yet it avoids his worst fault, which was artificiality. There is plenty of gilt and embossing in Francesco di Giorgio's St Dorothy and the Infant Christ (London National Gallery) but it is not a representation. It is a precious icon and a decorative artifact such as his antecedent Pietro Lorenzetti would have contrived; no pastiche of a distant age, such as Burne-Jones derived from such writers as Tennyson and William Morris. Francesco di Giorgio is aware of Florentine naturalism but chooses to ignore it. St Dorothy, her head aslant beneath her glittering halo, with the renunciatory smile of imminent martyrdom, gazes at the infant Christ as, holding her hand palm-to-palm, He steps confidently forward with His stoutly carried basket of summer-flowers in mid-winter, the miracle St Dorothy had promised her executioner.
Another work by Francesco di Giorgio hangs nearby: an Annunciation (Siena Pinacoteca) in which the scholarly Virgin turns from a shelf of leather-bound books, startled by the apparition of the Angel Gabriel. Mary, taken aback as she gazes at the angel large-eyed with mingled wonder and alarm under the greenish-tinged pallid flax of her braided hair, is caught in a posture half-way to flight. In contrast to Mary and the entrancing turquoise and white architecture behind her, the angel is ungainly and ill-painted. Francesco was, as well as a painter, a sculptor (whose unimpressive statue of Aesculapius is in the exhibition), an engineer responsible for Siena's water-supply and an architect of the ducal palace at Urbino. Like Leonardo he was versatile but unlike Leonardo he disliked leaving work unfinished, which sometimes meant that he finished it perfunctorily or handed it on to one of his many Studio assistants. That may have been the fate of the unfortunate Angel Gabriel.
Alongside Francesco's Annunciation hangs another at least as choice, with a still more delicate Virgin: that of Neroccio de' Landi (Yale University Art Gallery) in the form of a lunette. Mary bows her exquisite fair-locked head as she meditates on the glory for which she has been singled out. As she receives the Holy Spirit she holds her thumbs in a red book to mark the place where she has been reading. She rests on a carved sedella outside the loggia which shelters her tidily made though simple bed. The courtyard around her has an open gate in the sculptured wall through which a landscape may be seen. No doubt acres of religious symbolism are all about. As in Francesco di Giorgio's Annunciation the left side of the painting is marred, but to a lesser degree, by the representation of the Angel Gabriel, whose ballooning outer robe and girdle distort the composition. How one curses this imperfection in an otherwise perfect picture! Perhaps the Sienese of the 1470s were better at painting God's handmaiden than her etherial messenger. The tilted half-moon of Neroccio's Annunciation oversees a roomful of slight Madonnas in which his own Madonna of the Goldfinch (Cleveland Museum, Ohio) is the most graceful, her head bowed on her long neck like a snowdrop on its stalk. The rosebud tint of her cheeks rises and fades as untraceably as a blush. Her child rocks back on His tasselled cushion with infant jollity as He raises His hand in blessing.
