The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Duccio di Buoninsegna · the high altarpiece of Siena Cathedral, scored as one work as it was made and as it now stands · tempera and gold leaf on panel, double-sided and freestanding, with predellas and pinnacles · the Virgin and Child enthroned on the front, the Passion in small scenes on the back · commissioned 1308, carried to the cathedral in 1311 · sawn apart in 1771, the bulk reassembled in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena, the rest dispersed or lost
Mode
High altarpiece as icon and narrative cycle at once; the Byzantine Virgin in majesty turned toward a humane painting of persons
Mythos
Sacred time entire, from the Incarnation to the death of the Mother, with the city kneeling before her; the Mother to the nave, the Son’s Passion to the choir
Phase
Commissioned 1308, carried in procession and set on the high altar in 1311, moved from the high altar in 1506, sawn apart in 1771, reassembled in large part in Siena since the later nineteenth century
Presentation
Tempera and gold leaf on panel, double-sided and freestanding: one great field on the front, a grid of small fields on the back, with predellas and pinnacles on both faces
Register
Grave, tender and ordered; the grandeur of a court of heaven on one face, the intimacy of rooms, courtyards and gardens on the other
Scale
A city’s chief altarpiece: one enthroned Mother, her court, her four patrons, and the life and death of her Son
Governing Proposition
A commune commissions one panel with two faces: on the side turned to the nave and the city, the Mother of God enthroned as its sovereign, with its patrons kneeling and the painter’s own prayer written on her throne; on the side turned to the choir, the Passion of her Son told face by face in small scenes on gold. The wager is that the whole of sacred time can be built into the carpentry of one object, with the altar standing between its two halves.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1308 the works of Siena Cathedral contracted with Duccio di Buoninsegna, a Sienese painter active since the 1270s, for a new altarpiece for the high altar. The contract bound him to work on nothing else. It was the commune’s chief commission, and the painter carried it out with his workshop, in tempera and gold leaf on panel, over about three years.
What they made was a double-sided, freestanding altarpiece. On the front, one great field; beneath it a predella, above it pinnacles. On the back, a grid of small narrative fields on gold, again with predella and pinnacles. It stood on the high altar with one face to the nave and the other to the choir, and it is that object, as it was made, that is scored here, together with what of it now stands.
In June 1311 it was carried in procession from Duccio’s workshop to the cathedral and set on the high altar. The event is recorded in a contemporary Sienese chronicle and in the payments. A city carried a painting through its streets to its cathedral, and the painting it carried was a picture of the city on its knees.
Movement II
The front is a court. The Virgin sits enthroned with the Child, larger than life, in a deep blue mantle, against a field of gold. Angels crowd the throne, their heads leaning on its back; standing saints fill the ranks on either side; the apostles look down from arcades along the top. In the front rank, kneeling, are the four patron saints of Siena, Ansanus, Savinus, Crescentius and Victor, petitioning in the city’s name.
On the step of the throne runs an inscription, in the Latin as it is usually normalised: “MATER SANCTA DEI SIS CAUSA SENIS REQUIEI SIS DUCIO VITA TE QUIA PINXIT ITA.” Holy Mother of God, be the cause of peace for Siena, be life to Duccio, because he painted you thus. The commune asks for peace; the painter asks for life, and gives his work as the reason.
That is the front’s disclosure, and it is stated plainly: a city that places itself under a sovereign who is a mother, and a maker who counts himself among its petitioners by right of what he made. The centre cannot go. The choir around it can thin: the angels, the standing saints and the apostles in the arcades give mass and glory rather than argument, and a third of them could be lost without loss of meaning. Its grandeur is the grandeur of order, the icon made monumental.
Movement III
The form is the argument. The Mother faced the nave and the city; the Passion of her Son faced the choir and the clergy who celebrated the sacrifice at that altar; and the Eucharist was elevated between the two. The faithful faced the Mother, the clergy the Son’s death, and the two faces of one panel were the two natures of the mystery, with the altar between them.
The whole of sacred time is built into the carpentry. On the front, the Infancy of Christ in the predella, with prophets between the scenes; the Mother enthroned above; the last days of the Virgin in the pinnacles. On the back, the Ministry of Christ in the predella; the Passion above, from the Entry into Jerusalem to the appearances after the Resurrection, with the Crucifixion at the centre at double height; and in the pinnacles the appearances after the Resurrection and Pentecost.
Gold ground makes every scene a vision rather than a window. The front’s single field is an image to stand before; the back’s small fields are a story to follow, read close and in order. What holds the form below the top is that the scenes, as compositions, would say most of what they say in fresco or in a manuscript, and the order of the cycle is the Gospel’s more than the form’s. What lifts it is that the object, as one object, is a map.
Movement IV
On the back the sacred story happens between people, in rooms, courtyards and gardens. Judas kisses Christ in a crowd of torches. The three Marys stand before the empty tomb with the angel seated on it. At the Entombment the grief is averted. And in one panel two events are stacked on two floors: Christ before Annas above, and below, in the courtyard, Peter warming himself at the fire as the servant girl accuses him. One panel does the work of two, and binds them in one instant.
The language is the maniera greca, kept and turned. The faces are modelled with tenderness, the flesh laid over green underpaint to a softness not seen before in Tuscan panel painting; drapery falls over bodies; figures stand in architectural boxes that make rooms; gestures and glances carry the story from person to person; the colour orders each scene, the red of the crowd at the Entry, the dark of the Garden. The haloes and borders are punched and tooled; the gold hatching of the Child’s robe on the front is of the same hand and the same care.
The costs are visible. The rooms are assembled rather than constructed; the scenes do not share one spatial law, and the scale of figures to buildings shifts from panel to panel; some figures in the crowded scenes are summary, and the workshop’s hand shows in parts. In the same years at Padua, in The Arena Chapel (9.3), Giotto broke harder from the inherited language and carried the human reading of the story further. The Maestà’s swerve is a turn within the language rather than a break from it.
Movement V
The altarpiece stood on the high altar until 1506, when it was moved elsewhere in the cathedral. In 1771 it was sawn apart: the front was separated from the back and the panels were divided. Its frame and crowning are lost, and so are panels. Since the later nineteenth century the bulk of it has been in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Siena, where the front’s central image survives whole and legible and most of the back’s scenes are together again.
Other panels are abroad. The Annunciation, Christ Healing the Man Born Blind and the Transfiguration are in the National Gallery, London; the Nativity, with Isaiah and Ezekiel, and the Calling of Peter and Andrew in the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Temptation on the Mountain in the Frick Collection, New York; the Raising of Lazarus in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth; Christ and the Samaritan Woman in the Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid. Each purchase renewed the argument over what the whole was, and the double-sided object on its altar now exists only as a reconstruction on paper.
Its reach did not wait for its reassembly. In 1315 Simone Martini answered it with his own Maestà in the council chamber of the Palazzo Pubblico; Ugolino di Nerio, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and after them Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo, worked from its types; many later Sienese Maestàs took its form; and by way of Simone, Sienese line and colour passed to Avignon and the International Gothic. The main line of Italian painting, through Masaccio, runs from Giotto. The other school has its founding statement here.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged part by part on the work as made. The back is compelled by its story: the Passion is a sequence the liturgy fixes, and the selection reads as its necessary beats, the Entry, the Supper, the Betrayal, the trials, the Crucifixion, the burial and the tomb, each a step the next requires. Peter’s Denial set below Christ before Annas makes one panel do the work of two in one instant. The front’s centre cannot go: the enthroned Virgin is the city’s petition and the inscription’s addressee. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the front’s choir: the ranks of angels and standing saints and the apostles in the arcades could be thinned by a third without loss of meaning, and some Ministry scenes are interchangeable with others the Gospels offer.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Two disclosures, both of meaning. On the front, a commune placing itself under a sovereign who is a mother, its patrons kneeling in its name, the painter writing his own salvation into her throne: the city as a body that petitions, and the maker one of its petitioners by right of his work. On the back, the Passion as a drama of persons read face by face: Peter warming himself at the fire as the servant girl accuses him, Judas’s kiss in a crowd of torches, the Marys at the empty tomb, the averted grief at the Entombment. That holds outside Siena. Held below the gate because much of it is inherited doctrine given new eyes, and because the human reading is carried more fully, in the same decade, by Giotto at Padua.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The elevation is of two kinds, and it recurs. The front is grandeur: a field of gold, the Virgin larger than life in a deep blue mantle, the angels’ heads leaning on the throne’s back, a court of heaven set before a city. Its height is that of the icon made monumental. The back is a long sequence of smaller rises: the Entry into Jerusalem climbing toward the gate, the Crucifixion against gold with the crowd divided, the Deposition and the Entombment, the angel on the tomb before the three women. The frequency is high across many fields. What holds the axis is range of temperature: the scenes are intimate and grave, seldom terrible, and the front’s grandeur is that of order rather than transport; it rises often, and at one pitch.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the object is the structure of the Christian story: the Infancy at the foot of the front, the Mother enthroned above, her death in the front pinnacles; the Ministry, the Passion and the Resurrection behind; the faithful before the Mother, the clergy in the choir behind before the Son’s death. The two faces of one panel are the two natures of the mystery, and the altar stood between them. The particulars stay particular: Sienese patrons, a city’s gate in Jerusalem, a fire in a courtyard, three women’s faces at a tomb. The archetype is inherited, not invented, and that holds the axis below the top; but it is built into the carpentry, and the work reads as one map of sacred time.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The inheritance is the maniera greca: the Byzantine Virgin in majesty, the gold field, drapery hatched in gold, the Passion as a sequence of icons. The work keeps that language and turns it: faces modelled with tenderness, drapery that falls over bodies, figures placed in architectural boxes that make rooms, gestures and glances carrying the story between persons, colour of a new sweetness. The stake was large and public: the commune’s chief commission, a contract binding the painter to work only on it, the city’s procession at the end. But the swerve is a turn within the received language rather than a break from it. Giotto broke harder in the same years, in The Arena Chapel (9.3), and that is why the axis stands at the gate and not above it.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Substitute another form and much of what the work knows goes. The double-sided freestanding altarpiece is the instrument: the Mother faces the nave and the city, the Passion faces the choir and the clergy who celebrate the sacrifice at that altar, and the Eucharist was elevated between the two. Gold ground makes every scene a vision rather than a window. The front’s single field at the scale of a court, against the back’s small fields read close and in sequence, is the difference between an image to stand before and a story to follow. The inscription puts the painter inside the picture’s petition. Held below the top because the narrative scenes, as compositions, would say most of what they say in fresco or in a manuscript, and the cycle’s order is the Gospel’s more than the form’s.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Evidence over promise: about seven centuries, and the questions are active. The reconstruction of the whole, the arrangement of the back, the number and subjects of the lost pinnacles and the form of the crowning are argued still, and each dispersed panel bought by a museum renewed the argument. The shares of master and workshop are debated scene by scene. The relation to Giotto, and to Byzantium, is a standing question of the history of Italian painting. The panels yield on looking: the spaces of the Last Supper and the Washing of the Feet, the gestures at the Denial, the colour of the Entombment. Held below the top because much of the yield is reconstructive and art-historical, and the scenes, once read, keep their meanings rather than turning them over.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The field is Italian painting about 1310, and Siena’s above all. The intrinsic force is the reorganisation of the Byzantine image into a narrative and humane painting of persons, at the scale and in the most public form a city could commission: a founding statement of one of the two schools from which Italian painting descends. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Simone Martini’s Maestà of 1315 answers it directly in the council chamber of the Palazzo Pubblico; Ugolino di Nerio’s Santa Croce altarpiece and the narrative spaces of Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti work from its types, and the Sienese tradition through Sassetta and Giovanni di Paolo after them; many later Sienese Maestàs take its form; and Sienese line and colour pass by way of Simone to Avignon and the International Gothic. Held below the top because the main line, through Masaccio, runs from Giotto.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at about seven centuries. Form: the front’s central image survives whole and legible, and most of the back’s scenes survive, reassembled in Siena; but the work as made, a double-sided object on an altar, no longer exists. It was sawn apart in 1771, its frame and crowning are lost, panels are lost, and others hang in London, Washington, New York, Fort Worth and Madrid. Its meaning as one object, the faces turned to nave and choir, is now a reconstruction on paper. Presence: on the high altar until 1506, then moved within the cathedral, shown continuously in Siena, and long recognised. Fabric: the losses and wear of old tempera, the sawing, cleaning and repair. The dismemberment holds the figure at the foot of its band.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of tempera and gold on panel, judged to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The Virgin’s blue mantle, the gold hatching of the Child’s robe, the angels’ changing robes, the punched and tooled haloes and borders, the flesh laid over green underpaint to a softness not seen before in Tuscan panel painting; the narrative scenes small and exact, with architecture that holds the figures and colour that orders each scene, the red of the Entry’s crowd, the dark of the Garden. The carpentry of a double-sided altarpiece of this size was itself an achievement of the workshop. The costs: the rooms are assembled rather than constructed, the scenes share no one spatial law, some crowd figures are summary, and the workshop’s hand shows in parts.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the enthroned Mother on the front, an icon at monumental scale, and Peter at the fire in the courtyard on the back, a narrative figure in a small room. They obey one law: every figure is a holy person on gold, painted with the same face types, the same drapery and the same gravity, and ranked in a single order of sacred time from the Annunciation to the death of the Mother. The range is wide in mode, icon and story, court and street, death and glory, and it holds. Held below the top because the spatial law does not: architecture is set by each panel’s needs, the scale of figures to buildings shifts, and the front’s ranked court and the back’s rooms are two systems joined by the gold and the hand.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are many, and the object integrates them by where it sets them. The sacred, entire: the Incarnation, the Passion, the Resurrection, the death and glory of the Mother. History, as sacred history, from the prophets on the predella to Pentecost. The state: a commune under its Queen, its four patrons kneeling for it, its procession in 1311. The family: the Infancy, the Mother and Child, the Mother’s death among the apostles. Consciousness, in Peter’s denial and Judas’s kiss. Labour, in fishermen called from their boat. Art, in the painter’s name and prayer on the throne. What holds the axis is what is thin: nature is barely present on gold, ordinary life appears only at the edges of sacred scenes, and consciousness is shown in gesture, not held. Far short of Anna Karenina at 9.5.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.1 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, then The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Inner Law at 8.8. A command of tempera and gold, from the Virgin’s blue mantle to the small exact scenes of the Passion; the Christian story built into the carpentry of one object, the Mother to the nave and the Son’s Passion to the choir; a form whose two faces are an image to stand before and a story to follow; and a reorganisation of the Byzantine image that founded the Sienese school.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.3: the centre and the Passion are compelled, but the ranks of angels, saints and apostles on the front could be thinned by a third without loss of meaning, and some Ministry scenes are interchangeable with others. Next, The Unconcealment and The Encompassed at 8.4: a disclosure of inherited doctrine given new eyes, carried further in the same decade by Giotto at Padua; and many orders held, with nature barely present on gold and ordinary life only at the edges of sacred scenes.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.3 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.8, The Made at 9.1, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Archetypal Deep at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8 and The Imperishable at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, a disclosure of inherited doctrine given new eyes rather than a condition first brought into the open. The Universal Minimum is met (the lowest of the eleven axes it covers is The Inevitable at 8.3, against 7.5), and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.4. The twelve sum to 104.1, an average of 8.675 that displays 8.7; the aggregate stands below 9.0 in any case, and the altarpiece is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the object, its dispersed panels and its documented history, scored as one work: the Maestà of Duccio di Buoninsegna and his workshop, the high altarpiece of Siena Cathedral, tempera and gold leaf on panel, commissioned in 1308 and carried to the cathedral in June 1311, as it was made (a double-sided, freestanding altarpiece with predellas and pinnacles) and as it now stands (sawn apart in 1771, the bulk reassembled in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena, since the later nineteenth century, other panels in London, Washington, New York, Fort Worth and Madrid, others lost). The workshop’s share is inside the unit. The loss of the object’s form, its frame and crowning and some of its panels is charged under The Imperishable only. The inscription on the throne is quoted as the desk is certain of it in substance, in its usually normalised spelling, with the desk’s own English; nothing else is quoted. The Arena Chapel, Simone Martini’s Maestà and the later Sienese painters enter as the decade’s other cycle and as reach, and are credited on no axis. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the wood of the panels, the day of the contract and the day of the procession, the dimensions of the front and of the whole, the number of narrative scenes and of Passion scenes on the back, the exact count of surviving and lost panels, the form of the lost frame and crowning and whether it carried an Assumption or a Coronation, the payment for the work, how much of each panel is the master’s hand, and whether a double-sided high altarpiece with a narrative cycle on this scale had any precedent in Tuscany.