Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Arriving in Siena in “white moonshine” in 1873, Henry James stood in the horseshoe-shaped piazza, surveyed the “crenellated palace from whose overhanging cornice a tall, straight tower springs up with a movement as light as that of a single plume in the bonnet of a captain”, and enjoyed “half-an-hour’s infinite vision of medieval Italy”. He imagined the houses talking: “we are very old and a trifle weary, but we were built strong and piled high, and we shall last for many an age. The present is cold and heedless, but we keep ourselves in heart by brooding over our store of memories and traditions.”Their moment has come. The present is warmly attentive: Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 opens at London’s National Gallery on March 8 after high success at New York’s Metropolitan Museum. Uniting works — and altarpieces — unseen together for hundreds of years, and unlikely to be under the same roof again, the exhibition proposes 14th-century Siena as a dawn of the Renaissance: distinctive for the beauty, material splendour and refined delicacy of its paintings, sculptures and decorative objects, significant for its impact.It especially celebrates four painters, beginning with Duccio, the tempera master who absorbed Byzantine hieraticism into a lively, harmoniously coloured, expressive style. As Duccio’s angel Gabriel, back foot lifted, pink-gold wing billowing, strides into Mary’s courtyard, the National Gallery’s “Annunciation” (1308-11) announces the coming of a new art as well as a religion.Duccio’s followers were the inventive Simone Martini — “Christ discovered in the Temple” (1342) features a sulky teen who thinks he is God, confronted by a reproving dad, grabbing his shoulder, and an uneasy placating mum — and the Lorenzetti brothers: mercurial Ambrogio of the weird, affectionate guzzling baby and nursing mother “Madonna of the Milk” (c1325); calmer Pietro.Among monumental loans are Ambrogio’s St Nicholas cycle — in “Saint Nicholas and the Grain Ships” (1332-34), vivid blue angels send grain streaming down from celestial sacks — and Pietro’s opulent three-metre “Tarlati Polyptych” (1320). Here sculpturally solid saints in niches and pinnacles, like the statues rising up the facade of Siena Cathedral, surround the Virgin in fur-lined brocade, mink tails dangling. The luxurious surfaces portray Sienese precious fabrics, glassware, goldwork, all displayed in the exhibition.How did a small Tuscan town, overshadowed and threatened by rival Florence, flourish so superbly? And why was its glory overlooked for so long? Medieval Siena was a banking centre, thriving from its position on via Francigena, the pilgrim route to Rome. That brought prosperity and cultural influx — Duccio shares some sensibility with courtly Parisian illuminated manuscripts and small, heartfelt ivories.Politically, the city was proudly independent: a republic from 1125, with a university from 1240, Siena vanquished Florence in the Battle of Montaperti (1260). An artistic golden age ensued under “The Nine”, a government chosen every two months from merchant and noble families. One official was employed solely to recite Dante. Money flowed for buildings and their adornments. Ambrogio’s frescoes lined Palazzo Pubblico. Even Florentine Giorgio Vasari called Siena Cathedral’s marble mosaic floor “the most magnificent ever made”. By the time Vasari wrote, catastrophe had struck: in 1348 plague killed half Siena’s population, including the Lorenzettis; in 1555 it capitulated finally to Florence. Vasari’s Florence-dominated Lives of the Artists, the victor’s account, held long sway. The Louvre never acquired a Duccio. EH Gombrich’s The Story of Art gives Florentine pioneer Giotto seven pages; Duccio gets a paragraph, without illustration. Things changed in the 21st century. As art history swerved from a single highway to seek plural modernisms, so multiple, or nuanced, Renaissances looked possible. In 2004 the Met bought its only Duccio, a tiny “Madonna and Child” (1290-1300), for around $45mn — its most expensive purchase. “The first slide in an art history 101 course is a Duccio,” then-director Philippe de Montebello declared.Duccio’s gold-soaked ground and Virgin gazing sorrowfully at the baby she cradles follow eastern icons, but Byzantine rigidity disappears. Christ is no longer static, frontal: instead a chubby-fingered infant tugs his mother’s veil. That free-flowing veil is itself an innovation, a small drama of movement, undulating across face and neck. The scene comes to life although Duccio stylises elegantly — his slanting eyes and rosebud mouths characterise Sienese faces — and plays on artifice. He places the figures behind a marble balustrade: the first illusionistic parapet in European art, repeated by painters through the Renaissance inviting us into their fictive worlds. If Duccio’s “Madonna”, fluid yet rhythmic, serene yet emotionally intense, distils his world in miniature, his flabbergasting 60-part “Maestà”, a double-sided altarpiece, the largest known when it was carried in a procession to Siena cathedral in 1311, is his art’s summation. The main front panel, a gigantic Madonna whose broad midnight blue mantle spreads against a cream and gold throne, framed by flickering saints haloed in intricate tooled gold, never leaves Siena’s Duomo museum. The altarpiece was dismantled in 1771, and many panels, including London’s “Annunciation”, dispersed. The first reassembly since then of eight surviving back predella paintings chronicling Christ’s youth will be an exhibition highlight.Together, they display Duccio’s storytelling gift, how he represented Siena’s architecture both to give biblical scenes immediacy and to unify diverse panels into patterned grandeur. Terracotta roofs, pink and white turreted towers, arches, loggias, star alongside the figures in the “Temptations” of the devil in the temple and mountains, in “Christ and the Woman of Samaria” and “The Healing of the Man born Blind”. The sense is of Siena self-contained, self-referential. Painting so embedded in its culture is one reason why, compared to today’s homogenising trends, we find the Sienese Renaissance attractive. Yet in a final triumph, Sienese painting did travel and expand, helping shape the graceful sinuous 14th-15th-century international gothic style, when Martini in 1333 took his version of Duccio’s narrative lyricism — more intensely atmospheric, figures further individualised — to Avignon’s papal court. His “Orsini Polyptych” was probably made there. Another rare reconstruction — eight book-size panels from Paris, Antwerp and Berlin suggest Martini’s sphere of influence — it demonstrates tremendous condensed emotional range. One side unfolds Christ’s Passion: harrowing grief in a flame-red Mary Magdalene clutching the cross, an orange night sky illuminating chaotic mourners. On the other Gabriel in diaphanous gold flutters in, at once ethereal and a majestic presence. A softly delineated, horrified Mary shrinks into her elaborate throne.We are 20 years from Duccio’s Annunciation, to which Martini is indebted yet leaves behind for an almost fabular realism, and stronger dynamism. On the catalogue cover Martini’s golden angel presses forward, suggesting Sienese painting pushing ahead, outward. It has taken seven centuries for its achievement to be fully recognised; this exhibition will be one of the year’s wonders.March 8-June 22, nationalgallery.org.uk
