Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Simone di Martini
Sienese; 14th-century
New York, NY: Metrpolitan Museum of Art
90%
Saint Luke (from the Palazzo Pubblico Altarpiece). c1326-1330. Tempera and gold leaf on panel
There's something intensely difficult about articulating why this is the finest of the portraits from the Palazzo Pubblico altarpiece. (This difficulty could have something to do with the violence that any consideration of these paintings as discrete artworks does to Simone's original conception: these aren't pictures, but components of an ensemble.) But to take a stab: the contoured fullness of Luke's vestments — their closeness to appearing as though they have real dimensional existence — gives way in the painting's upper quarter to the very unreal hard-line depiction of the saint's bust, which is emphatically without orientation in space. This produces an acute instance of Sienese painting's marquee effect, the floating atop gold that its figures do as though material presence is being peeled off the surface of a flat ideal immanence. The envelopment, as well, of the red of Luke's shirt by his duller shawl contributes to this. (2024)