“Siena: the Rise of Painting” (The National Gallery)

Before meeting with our friends, we had some time to finally attend a much anticipated exhibition that is still going on* at the National Gallery, “Siena: the Rise of Painting”: it was, without a doubt, absolutely splendid.

The exhibition covers one of my most beloved periods in Italian art, and mediaeval art in particular, the Trecento, when the traces of the mighty Byzantium empire are fading, starting to form what we call now a Western art canon. Duccio di Buoninsegna, the founder of the Sienese school, was the one who made— and established—that unmistakable golden hue on tempera to look simultaneously divine and vigorously alive; his apprentices and followers, Simone Martini (the one whom Petrarch asked to create the portrait of his Muse, Laura), the Lorenzetti brothers and others, continued and developed his art ethos.

Inside this northern summer’s fold

The fields are full of naked gold,

Broadcast from heaven on lands it loves;

The green veiled air is full of doves;

Soft leaves that sift the sunbeams let

Light on the small warm grasses wet

Fall in short broken kisses sweet,

And break again like waves that beat

Round the sun’s feet. ©

Art critics tend to call the artworks of this era elemental: hard to disagree with that. However superficial the description is (after all, the Siena school paintings look fundamentally artistic in the way we perceive the Italian proto-Renaissance), their exceptional liveliness, despite all the perspective quirks, makes them so uniquely supreme.

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* It will be over in a month or so, and I highly recommend to visit