The Devil is in the Detail
A missing 12-year-old boy has been located in the gallery but there’s no need to alert the museum guards as his anxious parents are busy berating him. His dad Joseph is red-faced with anger and his mum Mary is asking him what-on-earth he thought he was doing. In fact, the boy was doing precisely what he was sent to do on earth, lecturing at the temple, speaking his truth as depicted by Simone Martini in this small painting, Christ Discovered in the Temple 1342. Brilliantly crammed with relatable emotion and rendered in an exquisite palette set off with stippled gold, it’s no wonder Martini’s paintings caused a stir in his native Siena, one that’s still shaking the world to this day, writes Ed Gray.
Painstakingly gathered in the gloom of this National Gallery setting, laid to evoke a cathedral-like space, are Sienese treasures from a 50-year period when its leading painters built on the success of the city’s goldsmiths. Buoyed by stable governance and merchants’ cash they created innovative public art and private commissions to rival the majesty of the Florentine Renaissance.
These paintings beckon in the dark, shimmering on approach, the gold highlights the humanity of the faces, and gives rhythm to the delicate folds of drapery, then suddenly silhouette the Virgin and saints depicted as if reminding us that these are eternal spirits inhabiting an afterlife. Imagine the sense of wonder for a believer, or indeed a doubter, stepping into a church from the sweat and stink of a Sienese street to be confronted by these candlelit scenes.
Siena is a city devoted to the Virgin, and her painters pulled every trick out of their paintboxes to do her justice, including complex structural scenes of Sienese architecture, keeping it real, as they sought to make work that would put them and their city on the map. Duccio Di Buoninsegna’s infant Christ in Virgin and child 1290 is dandled and coddled as he reaches up to touch her in a vision of maternal intimacy redolent of many in the exhibition. Her look is one of every new parent, revelling in the blessing of their child, imagining a future life for their bundle of joy. But Mary’s gaze also reveals her fears as he pulls a veil across her face. There will be an end to it. Siena’s painters are storytellers, packing multi-dimensional narratives into minimal dimensions, precious altar pieces of perfection that wrap and unwrap, like books, or tombs- to open one is an act of devotion.
Human touch is everywhere in these paintings, whether saint or Sienese sinner. The centre piece of this exhibition is Duccio’s eight base panels depicting the life of Christ, made for a huge altarpiece that was later sawn up and sold off after Siena fell on tough times, suffering both pandemic and plague. Here the panels are brought together to reveal familiar scenes of Jesus rebuffing the temptations of a charcoal black devil – you can almost smell the soot. He probably shouldn’t evoke sympathy, but I’m all for an underdog. Later, in an amazing painting of multiple complex perspectives by Ambrogio Lorenzeti the devil strangles a child, and I concede Jesus’s point.
A serpentine line runs through the set of Duccio’s panels with Jesus at dynamic structural points throughout the line as he inexhaustibly delivers the goods at the wedding at Cana, heals the blind man in a brilliantly delivered triple portrait and raises a befuddled Lazarus who emerges from his tomb with a look of total disbelief and fear at the awe-stricken gathered crowd, as you would.
Back in the gallery of earthly delights a belligerent man is arguing with his wife over which saint is which in Simone Martini’s stunning series Madonna and Child and Saints as she identifies them correctly, much to his annoyance. The saints are well and truly alive after seven hundred years and Siena’s crowning glory has risen again at the National Gallery. Until June 22nd.
Booking and full details: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/exhibitions/siena-the-rise-of-painting
