Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Guccio di Mannaia
Sienese; 13th-century, 14th-century
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
70%
The Crucifixion. c1310-1320. Marble and colored wax
There's a small sense in which this object is more complete artistically than the great old gold and painted expressions of Siena's (very) early modern sensibility. Namely, this thing is an object totally and coherently, which is what many Sienese altarpieces and polyptychs — in their straining between actual and pictorial thereness — precisely lack. The slight embossment of the limning on the front, for instance, makes for a correspondence between the image, its incised border, and the ornamental bands along the side of the slab; these bands' dimensions and dappling rhyme with the cross in the picture. Other generally salubrious pictorial elements include the low-weighted design and the weird expanses it opens up to either side of Christ, as well as the ambivalent relationship between the representation and its stone ground. However, the main scene is a bit too fine, stiff, and tentative to make all of this appear cogent. (2024)