We are Sienese, if you please

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vanni-merlin

00martedì 30 ottobre 2007 01:07

We are Sienese, if you please

The city of Siena is about to give Florence a run for its Renaissance art-history money

Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Renaissance Siena
National Gallery

Who could ask for a more graceful hostess of a gathering? St Catherine of Siena greets you as you enter this show. Never before has she left her native city, where, from the little chapel built on the site of her father’s basement workshop, she annually performs such invaluable functions as the blessing of the horses that are to enter the famous Palio race. It is deeply significant - and favourably auspicious - apparently, if one of the equines defecates in her sacred presence.

But, now, as the first of many signs of the significance of the National Gallery’s latest show, St Catherine steps down from her niche above the altar and travels to London. Now she meets you at the doorway of Renaissance Siena, a symbol of all that is most delicate, most moving and lovely about Sienese art.

When you think of the art of this city, the work of its medieval masters most probably comes to mind. You may think of Duccio breathing sinuous life into old Byzantine forms; or his pupil, Simone Martini, lending spiritual grace to a Gothic ideal. Sienese art in the Middle Ages is universally admired. But with the dawning of the Renaissance, thoughts tend to drift away from this walled city towards its neighbour and long-standing rival, Florence. We turn from the ethereal serenity of what has started to feel like an outmoded aesthetic towards the thrilling discoveries of the great Tuscan masters who were introducing a striking new sense of reality to their work.

It is hardly surprising - not least since Florence finally conquered Siena in 1555 and history is written by victors. But as, for the first time, the National Gallery presents a survey of the work of this city between 1458, when Pius II (a member of the powerful Piccolomini family of Siena) was made Pope, and 1530, when the Habsburg troops marched into the city (marking the beginning of the end for the once independent republic), it focuses less on clichés of cultural progress than on the way that a vision develops organically out of a society, presenting a cumulative picture of its place and times.

The linear march of Renaissance history is replaced by a more subtle, shifting, side-stepping, dancing life in a wonderful show that appreciates the ways in which a city speaks of its own distinctive character through the work it produces. This is a show to celebrate a Renaissance of another sort.

Siena, as this exhibition presents it, was a tough, proud, stubbornly independent place. Dedicated to the Virgin and protected by a panoply of saints, it clung to the spiritual legacy of a medieval era as it had been embodied by the works of such painters as Martini. His precious images were even used as illustrations in the sermons of local-boy-made-good St Bernardino, who appears in this show preaching from what looks like a home-made soap-box pulpit.

This distinct Sienese style, so expressive of spirituality, is the artistic equivalent of a dialect. It remains at the root of the city’s aesthetic throughout the period that this show covers. We may see it adapted and altered as such Renaissance advances as perspective and modelling are introduced; as Siena, in what must have been seen as a great propaganda coup, lures Florence's most famous sculptor, Donatello, to work within its walls; or, under the auspices of the powerful Piccolomini family (who produced not just one but two Popes) plays host to such trophy talents as Raphael. But again and again that innate lyrical elegance, that light dancing touch that sets solid figures swaying, saints leaping on tiptoe, patterned draperies swirling and spidery fingers pointing, infuses these images with an almost frolicsome levity that brings them to what feels more like a spiritual than a physical life.

The bottomless glow of Byzantine icons may slowly give way to perspective, for instance, but in Neroccio di Landi’s Annuncation notice how wilfully non-explanatory this is. It does not serve to articulate realistic spaces. Rather it draws the eye inwards to rush it up to ethereal realms. Donatello may have introduced ideas of three-dimensional modelling into narrative paintings, but look how the Sienese flirt with his sculptural solidity. One moment they are lending patterned outlines a new bulging bas-relief dimension, the next they are portraying living saints like sculptures in niches, as if the gaze of God was a Gorgon’s stare. Renaissance advances are not rejected, but adapted and augmented as they are subtly blended with native traditions.

This happens for many reasons. A scholarly catalogue discusses them - from the civic pride of a stalwart republic, through a fear of being overwhelmed by more powerful states, to the vagaries of differing patrons or the influences of artistic companies that encourage chameleon individuals to adapt their talents to suit site-specific jobs.

But as this show reassembles the magnificent altarpieces that for centuries have been dismembered, bringing together beautiful panel paintings, sculptures and drawings by a series of mostly unfamiliar (and often anonymous) masters, it gathers also a sense of a spiritual aura. Despite all the damage, the fading, battering, the clumsy restorations and the garish finale of Beccafumi’s works, the spectator is drawn ever deeper into a distinct imaginative space. He enters a world of melancholy, sloe-eyed maidens, of gesticulating dramas, of figures set dancing by a shimmering energy.

Look at Liberale Da Verona’s two pictures illustrating scenes from the life of St Peter. As he heals a lame beggar, we see him standing slightly stiffly in a conventionally classical pose. But in the next scene alongside it, as we watch him refusing a corrupt offering of money, he seems suddenly to be set swaying to an expressively sinuous rhythm. His shrinking refusal of the cash comes to fresh life as this outsider artist picks up on and appropriates local stylistic traits.

Or step on to the stage of Benvenuto di Giovanni’s little tempera painting of Adam and Eve being expelled from Paradise. It may be tiny but it has immediate impact. As the angel stands foursquare in the centre, he becomes a pivot for the struggling contortions of the pair of distressed humans whom he has been sent to banish. You can feel the shove of the angel’s sinewy forearms. The tensions knot and tangle across the picture plane. And as Eve is shunted away, still indignantly arguing, you can almost hear her cries ringing shrilly amid the harsh swirl of the rocks.

In the images of Renaissance Siena, art is brought to life by a strange rhapsodic force.

Renaissance Siena: Art for a City is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885; nationalgallery.org.uk)

da: entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/visual_arts/article276...

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