Duccio's Now: On Sienese Painting

Duccio di Buoninsegna, The Temptation of Christ on Mountain, 1308-11, tempura on panel, from the Maesta altarpiece. The Frick Collection, New York

The Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition of Sienese painting, which closes on January 25, 2025, has inspired me to recall my reasons for believing that there is no such thing as progress in art. In Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, 1568, Giorgio Vasari argued that Michelangelo, Leonardo, and other Florentine painters were more advanced and therefore better than Duccio di Buoninsegna, Simone Martini, and their Sienese colleagues. In command of linear perspective, tonal modeling, and other tricks of the verisimilitude trade, painters in Florence depicted the world and its inhabitants with a new precision. For nearly half a millennium, artists, art historians, curators, and casual museumgoers have agreed with Vasari’s verdict: advancing into the future, the masters of the Florentine Renaissance left Duccio and company in the late-medieval dust. As likeable as Duccio’s images may be, they are backward—even primitive. To believe this, you have to conflate art with science and technology.

Physics has developed since Michelangelo’s time. So, for example, has the technology of steel manufacture. Though art does not advance, we praise artists for “breakthroughs” comparable to sudden advances in the laboratory or on the factory floor. Abstraction was the big breakthrough in twentieth-century painting, or so its proponents insisted. And it must have been exciting in 1919 to feel that an appreciation of Piet Mondrian’s new work was propelling you into the future. But the excitement of the new can distract us from crucial questions, for example: in what sense does a Mondrian from 1919 improve on a Michelangelo from 1512? Is the Mondrian truer than the Michelangelo in the way that contemporary physicists’ accounts of the physical world are truer than accounts from earlier centuries? Is the Mondrian painting more efficient than Michelangelo’s, as the manufacture of textiles is more efficient now than it was in the sixteenth century?

If these questions seem silly, it may be because you intuit something basic: art does not give us truths.  It gives us meanings. Nor is the point of art to be efficient. The point is to generate possibilities for meaning. Look, for a moment, at Duccio’s The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain, from the Maestá altarpiece, 1308-11. However theologians define Christ, as human or divine or both at once, they never say that he is twice as tall as a cathedral tower. Yet that is how Duccio depicts him. None of Vasari’s Florentine heroes would do such a thing, and yet I doubt that he would have accused Duccio of making a simple error. Even Vasari would acknowledge that the Sienese painter was after something other than verifiable truth. As indeed he was.

In the Temptation panel, Duccio illustrates the passage in The Book of Matthew where Satan says to Christ: worship me and I will give you dominion over the world. This is an offer that Christ must of course refuse, for a reason Duccio conveys with his miniaturized cities: compared to the divine Word his gigantic Christ embodies, the cities’ worldly wealth and power are of negligible value. If, like Duccio, you are a Christian believer, you take the supremacy of the Word of God as a truth sustained by faith. If, like me, you are not religious, truth is not at issue. What matters is the judgment about the value of things—a judgment rife with meaning—that Duccio generates with his out-of-scale buildings.

Turning from the ethical to the architectural, note the independent system of perspective that organizes each of the cities standing along the lower edge of the panel. This independence renders space disjunctive—an effect defined as a fault by the Florentine Leon Battista Alberti, whose treatise On Painting, 1435, contains a how-to section on rendering pictorial space uniform with one-point perspective, and thereby orienting every form in a painting to a unified set of orthogonals. We expect this uniformity, so Duccio’s disjunctions look odd, though open to interpretation. We could say, for example, that he localizes perspective to suggest that each of the localities in his painting has a distinctive and unified way of being: its own character. So here is a sharp contrast: the unity (and independence) of the individual motif in Sienese painting versus the unity of the space that encloses a Florentine painting’s array of motifs. If the latter seems more advanced, it is for a powerful but ultimately unpersuasive reason.

The stars, the sun, and the moon sparkle and orbit in space continuous with ours, or so Galileo said, and modern astronomers agree. This view of the cosmos is an advance over those of ancient cosmographers, who all proposed at least two spatial realms: the sublunary kind that we inhabit and the higher, exalted kind where gods and other sacred entities reside. It is an immense error, however, to let analogy lead us into the temptation of concluding that the uniform pictorial space enforced by Albertian perspective is, like Galilean space, an advance on earlier models. Again, there is progress in science. Building on the work of Copernicus before him, Galileo rendered pre-modern cosmographies obsolete. But Michelangelo did not visit obsolescence upon Duccio any more than the 1960s required us to trade Abstract Expressionism in for Pop Art or Minimalism. Nearly a century after it appeared, the work of Pollock, Krasner, and de Kooning is alive with meaning yet to be elucidated. For that is what is at stake: not truth but meaning.

Still, even Sienese painting’s keenest fans often seem a bit embarrassed by its old-fashioned, pre-modern look. In his History of Italian Painting, 1923, Frank Jewett Mather wrote that “the beauty” of Duccio’s work “is not that of outer reality but of revery and meditation. It never has the tang and variety of good Florentine narrative painting, but within its lovingly modulated monotony, Sienese narrative painting is supremely charming.”  Monotony? Not sure what he’s getting at there, but his talk of charm echoes through recent reviews of the Met’s exhibition of Sienese painting. And the word fits. Yet charm is the least significant quality of Duccio’s painting, which in its own way addresses its subjects as responsively—and as responsibly—as Michelangelo or Gustave Courbet address theirs.

To see this, I set aside lingering notions of Western painting’s progress toward ever greater fidelity to appearances; I then imagine my way into the sensibility that guided Duccio’s variation on the style that prevailed in Siena during the first half of the fourteenth century. To do that in detail would produce a book-length manuscript. So I’ll end with the thought that I can’t get even a superficial sense of Duccio’s or any other artist’s work unless I manage somehow to see its meanings unfolding in the present—not in my present but in that of the image. Because this is what a work of art does. It draws us into its now, its moment, and makes the meanings of that moment relevant to us in our necessarily different and often quite distant moment.