Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Duccio di Buoninsegna
Sienese; 13th-century, 14th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
88%
Virgin and Child (The Stoclet Madonna). c1290-1300. Tempera and gold leaf on wood
The parapet that holds Madonna back from the picture plane is more than just a cool innovation in the history of painting-as-a-technology-for-enclosing-worlds — it is an aesthetic boon, instigating tension between figure and gold ground where, in previous religious painting, there had mostly been just an eerie ambivalence. This tension would animate Sienese painting till its midcentury curtailment by the plague, in many instances more pronouncedly than it does in Duccio's work, which is slightly stiffer and more spatially medieval than that of even a minor figure like Segna (let alone Simone). (Appearing awkwardly advanced, as Duccio often does, is a price many of history's most inventive artists have had to pay.) The challenge with this painting, then, is that it's interstitial; its success as an artwork lies in the combination of its antiquatedly distinct (linear) forms with a special softness — Duccio's shading — that starts bringing them to life. (2024)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
86%
The Crucifixion with Saints Nicholas and Gregory, and the Redeemer with Angels. c1311-1318. Tempera and gold leaf on wood
For modern viewers unsteeped in the hagiology, there's something insurmountably tough to like about these Sienese multi-panel works. (Because these combines are tough to like properly, it's often that the prettiness of their gold leaf comes in to provide for a misguided effusive loving.) In this triptych, the relation between the saints and the central scene is more conceptual than it is structural: not knowing all the quattrocento ins-and-outs of Catholic belief, I struggle to find much compositional justification for the aloofness to the crucifixion of, for instance, Gregory's and Nicholas's postures, or the patterns on their clothes. Not so, however, for the image of the redeemer above, which tosses the upward thrust of the main tableau's action right back down to earth, nor for the swaying effect to the whole picture introduced by the sinking down of the left group and the reaching up of the right. (2024)