Duccio's Maestà: you open a door and walk into the golden court of heaven
Original photos and video of the most magnificent medieval painting I've ever seen
Exemplar of the Sienese Gothic, the Trecento
We are used to hearing, “Oh, the photos don’t do it justice,” but this is doubly true for the Maestà (“Majesty”) by Duccio di Buoninsegna, whose use of Byzantine and Gothic effects give it an impact like no other painting I’ve yet seen.
First, the size of it bowls you over - it’s 4 metres long (over 13 feet). Then the incredible brilliance of all that gold leaves you breathless. You come in out of the heat and glare of a Sienese summer morning, and the room is dark and very cool and quiet and totally dominated by the enormous painting and it’s almost a shock. You are confronted with this glittering assembly of heavenly figures, many of their gentle faces looking out at you, as though you have somehow stumbled across some threshold into a room where Heaven is holding court.
In the high tourist season of mid-July you are never alone with it, but you feel you might as well be; no one is talking, even in whispers, in its presence.
We don’t need to characterise it as “Early Renaissance” as it’s often described. At this site we work from the proposal that the so-called Florentine "Renaissance" was not, contrary to popular notions, the ultimate cosmically-ordained teleological end of all art, to which and from which all roads converge.
No, this painting is the Sienese Gothic Trecento1, in distilled form, one of the most celebrated works of medieval Italian art. Painted between 1308 and 1311 for the high altar of the Duomo of Siena, this monumental altarpiece represents the absolute pinnacle of medieval Sienese painting.
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The Maestà is so enormous, so magnificent and important in its pivotal position in the history of medieval art, so full of detail and meaning in every aspect, as well as physically so large in proportion and complexity, with its many narrative small panels, that we’re going to have to split this up into multiple posts.
So get ready to spend a little time in 14th century Siena.
Best get to it…