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To pick up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, the Met has been building a case for Siena since 2004, when it spent $45 million on a Madonna and Child by Duccio. It was all but asking for controversy, as the surest route to publicity, and got it.

The New York Times wondered at the price for a painting “no bigger than a sheet of typing paper.” A professor at Columbia, James H. Beck, called it a forgery. Today the Met boasts more than ever of its treasure, and it stands apart as prologue to the exhibition. It has an intimacy and delicacy long associated with Duccio, and its very size indicates a painting not for churches, but for private devotion. One can still see the marks of candle flames on its bottom edge.

So, at any rate, the Met says, but a new era really does begin with Duccio di Buoninsegna in Siena and Giotto in Florence. Duccio’s infant Jesus reaches up to his mother, affirming his, Mary’s and a believer’s reverence and affection. In another Madonna, the child takes hold of a golden veil, extending it to the right. It has become a token of royal grandeur. It all takes place just behind the illusion of a carved-wood parapet, setting Jesus and Mary into a space at once yours, too, and theirs alone. That establishes intimacy, too.

True, Beck finds the gesture so badly painted as to rule out the work’s authenticity, the arm a mere stump. He also finds the parapet without precedent for at least another hundred years. Still, it is a wonder that anything survives as more than a stump when the entire surface is cracked, peeling, and overcleaned. And maybe, just maybe, the parapet is an innovation. As it is, there is no clear precedent for Duccio himself. He may have studied in France, Florence, or anywhere at all.

It is just the kind of dispute that has told against Siena for ever so long. It and Florence are little more than an hour apart by car, by much the same route that a trader took back then, but they could be a lifetime apart. Oh, and did I mention Giotto along with Duccio? Western art history often compares the two—in order to introduce the Renaissance in Florence. Lectures show their work on two screens, the better to explain the greatness of Giotto. And Duccio has nothing of his solid, almost columnar human forms, real spaces, and human personalities, filled with fear and love.

Not that the comparison means to write off Duccio as the last stand of medieval art—the art that Giotto surpassed. It means only to distinguish two artists and two paths to what was then the future. Still, a class may never mention Siena again. The Met is out to change that. It has a habit of throwing its weight around on behalf of new narratives and new attributions. For once, though, its expertise and arrogance may pay off.

It connects Tuscany to broader trends in Europe. It includes sculpture from Italy and France, much of it more delicate, intricate, and fully modeled than Sienese painting. It includes manuscript illumination in France by Jean Pucelle and later the Limbourg brothers. And the influence ran both ways. It has an aside for textiles, at least one of which appears in the background to a painting. That trade route was also the Silk Road—and I continue next time with Duccio’s place in history.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.