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Spotlight on Siena
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16256 |
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THE ARTS
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3 / 1989 |
1,350 Words |
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Jason Edward Kaufman
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In the Tuscan city of Siena, during the quattrocento (1400s), the communal government and the cathedral were the leading patrons of art. Trade guilds, monastic orders and, less frequently, private citizens also commissioned work for their chapels, churches, and homes. Occasionally, the need arose for a mural or decorated manuscripts, but the painter's primary vocation was the making of altarpieces.
The standard fifteenth-century altarpiece consisted of multiple painted compartments framed by an arcade-shaped, architectural housing. This complex format was called a polyptych. Typically, a large central panel with an image of the Madonna and Child was flanked by vertical panels (up to three on either side) depicting standing saints. Sometimes a second tier displayed angels, cherubs, or more saints, and pinnacles contained vignettes of the Annunciation, the Holy Trinity, or the Madonna or Christ in Glory. A narrow strip of compartments along the base, or predella, of the altarpiece, contained episodes from the life of one of the dedicatory saints, or from Christ's Passion.
In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, dealers saw fit to cut apart these polyptychs in order to sell the components as independent works of art. Cathedrals themselves were guilty of this practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when they distributed portions of surplus altarpieces to subsidiary churches in their regions. As a result of this dismantling, museums today often possess only fragments of larger works, whose components are widely dispersed.
An exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Painting in Renaissance Siena: 1420-1500, brings together approximately a hundred of these pictures, as well as a number of illuminated choir books and two wall paintings. The curators have reunited for the first time since their dissection many small narrative scenes which once belonged to altarpiece predellas. Museum visitors are thus able to examine complete quattrocento cycles devoted to the lives of Saint Anthony, Catherine of Siena, and Bernardino, as well as the Passion of Christ, a privilege ordinarily restricted to museum-goers on the other side of the Atlantic.
Fragile Paintings
Many of the works have been drawn from foreign collections and have never before been seen in the United States. That the exhibition contains panels from galleries throughout Europe and the United States as well as from Australia is extraordinary. Panel paintings such as these, which are composed of tempera pigment (ground minerals suspended in egg yolk) applied to wooden boards that have been prepared with a thin layer of fine gesso (plaster), are so fragile that most museums prohibit their being loaned.
The fact that the Metropolitan owns the largest group of Sienese fifteenth-century paintings outside Siena makes it the ideal host for an exhibition of this kind. Both the museum's reputation and that of Sir John Pope Hennessy, regarded as the world's foremost scholar of Italian Renaissance art, to whom, on the occasion of his seventy-fifty birthday, the exhibition is dedicated, certainly played large parts in securing these rare loans. According to Keith Christensen, curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan and the chief organizer of the show, "Only objects that could be hand carried, were in stable condition,
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