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To wrap up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, an altarpiece by Pietro in Pieve has its own Gothic architecture, with the main panel supporting a seeming church tower, and the gold background could almost pass for sky. Ambrogio takes one inside, his three-tiered household as three acts in a domestic drama. He gives people the run of the streets.

With Martini’s Orsini Polyptich, the cast moves every which way in the shallow space below the cross. They spill out from the city’s gates. Their gestures and props create a near chaos of competing pagans and worshippers.

The protagonists have a greater freedom and responsibility as well. Mary can draw back or look up from the angel of the Annunciation, her prayer book fallen aside. Martini’s Saint John has unkempt blond hair and clasped hands, at once youthful and reserved. His Pontius Pilate may be winning the argument with Jesus. More often, his bust-length saints glower, much as for Cimabue decades before in Florence. Miracles have becomes matters of fact.

Technique has a greater variety as well. Ambrogio sketches on plaster in sinopia, the earth pigment often used for the preliminary layer that a fresco will efface. Its faint outlines have survived, though, like the first thoughts of an artist today. He also plays with gold leaf as at once background, a tooled halo, and jewelry for Mary herself. So much for the Virgin’s modesty. The red of simulated marble for Pietro could pass for blood.

By 1350, all four artists and their rivals were dead. Still, the black plague was about to set in, taking perhaps a third of the population. Historians have long seen it as bringing a premature end to the Renaissance’s cautious or daring beginning. Art after Giotto in Florence will look dour and disheartened as well. It can only look back. Whether Siena ever could look ahead must remain up for debate.

The curators have a lot to reconstruct and far to travel. It shows in their affiliations alone—Stephan Wolohojian of the Met, Laura Llewellyn of London’s National Gallery, and Caroline Campbell of Ireland’s National Gallery, with Joanna Cannon of the Courtauld Institute in London. They were bound to open with the Met’s Stoclet Madonna, and they were bound to describe it in glowing terms. Mostly, though, they supply a convincing back and forth between context and the four leading artists. They also pause for large works and works in series. One need never get lost in the maze of dark walls.

They do not, though, include contact with Florence or classicism. Nicola Pisano, who worked between Florence and Pisa shortly before, was closer than those here to ancient Rome and its influence. His sculpture looks ahead to Lorenzo Ghiberti, Andrea del Verrocchio, Donatello, and Michelangelo in the next century. The show does stop in Assisi, but with no indication that Giotto may have worked there, and in Arezzo, but with no mention of Piero della Francesca and his frescoes there yet to come. A comparison could have added context, just as in paired slides in a lecture. The Met, though, has a case to make, a case for Siena.

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

To pick up from last time on early Renaissance Siena, against that background, the show can afford to stick to a small but significant circle of artists. Duccio had an heir in Simone Martini, a student.

Two other likely students, the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, kept separate workshops but stayed close in style and everything else. The Met speculates that two of their panels once hung together as a diptych. (It cannot point to hinge marks or external evidence.) It ends with Martini to bring the story back to its source.

Duccio has his hand everywhere. Whenever a man at the cross raises a lance without piercing the side of Jesus, he quotes Duccio and the artist’s love of crowds. In fact, pretty much any genre quotes Duccio on account of a single altarpiece, the Maestà, commissioned in 1303, with close to fifty panels. It takes its name, meaning majesty or triumph, from the largest panel, front and center, of an enthroned Madonna. The ranks of angels to either side do little but add color, like the rhythms of a song celebrating her glory. One can practically hear it.

One cannot hear much else. Losers do not write history, but artists and poets do, and they had begun to erase Siena from Renaissance history before its work ended. Dante wrote of how Cimabue in Florence, who had his own Maestà in 1280, once held the field but is now eclipsed by Giotto. (No wonder he was in Purgatory for the sin of pride.) Years later, Vasari, himself a Renaissance painter, began his Lives with just those two artists. Sometime around Vasari’s birth in 1511, the dismantling of Duccio’s altarpiece had already begun.

The Met reconstructs it anyway, with photographs and wall text for its front and back. It also brings together one side of the entire predella, or supporting bottom row. That may not sound impressive, but it extends the length of a wall, and it shows Duccio as an able story-teller. A predella often constructs a narrative, and this one is about the ministry of Jesus—with miracles subordinate to a commanding life. Duccio builds a story by relating one figure to another and both to a city very much like Siena. It creates a cumulative picture of a rocky landscape and farmland just outside formidable city walls.

In a panel from the Frick Collection, the devil tempts Jesus with the seven cities of the world. The black devil looks rather like a bearded Richard Nixon, and Jesus looks relaxed and impassive. Each city has its own size and design, but all crisp and candy-colored. Duccio just cannot individuate his actors all that much, and he has no room for city streets. No one really loves or suffers, and no one plays an obvious part. He does, though, have his temptations. It will take the remaining artists to have more.

Their approach is startling. Pietro Lorenzetti depicts the Crucifixion on a shaped panel with an irregular base, where a skull rests on green earth. It has an illusion of depth that brings death home while introducing painting to landscape. A more conventional panel from his brother gives the infant Jesus a fuller body and dark eyes. He looks away from his mother’s breast, coy and aware. There may be a human world after all in scripture and Sienna—and I continue next time with more on Duccio’s fellow artists.

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

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.

Can this be the Dark Ages? Europe in 1300 was bursting with art and light.

Gothic architecture had soared into the light and brought it into the cathedral. In the quiet confines of books and illuminated manuscripts, rtists were beginning to picture medieval life as never before. Philosophy, a school called Scholasticism, had blessed intellectual inquiry. It positively demanded a return to classical times and the rigor of Aristotle—in the service, of course, of true belief. And so much more was to come, if, that is, one knew where to look. How about, say, to Tuscany?

A weak pope was facing greater challenges, even as trade routes to the East brought new goods, new ideas, and a new prosperity. And a key route, connecting France and Italy, ran right through Tuscany—in particular, though Siena. Local princes were showing their strength, and Siena was styling itself a republic dedicated to the Virgin. It also held off its chief rival, Florence, in war earning the right to try. The Renaissance was not so very far off after all, and the Met looks beyond Florence for its origins. It is “Siena: The Rise of Painting,” through January 26, and it will be my subject all this week, with an extra post tomorrow for Siena’s place in Europe and now the Met.

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

So many Eastern religions have embraced mandalas as connections to something beyond everyday pleasures and everyday cares. So many everywhere have marveled at their decorative richness.

Followers of Carl Jung have weighed in as well, because what Jungian can resist universal truths? So take a deep breath before entering the Lehman wing at the Met. “Mandalas” asks to appreciate them for what they are—not just catch phrases and aids to meditation, but literal guides to the spiritual universe. As the show’s subtitle has it, it is “Mapping the Buddhist art of Tibet,” through January 12.

You may need a map, a believer all the more so. This intricate universe reads outside-in, with concentric rows, columns, and circles of symbols like stamps or playing cards for the many steps in Vajrayana Buddhist practice. Over time, the rituals became more and more distinct, corresponding to distinct Tibetan sects. And the show also displays accessories to practice, most over a hundred years old. They are the practices of a warrior, with swords and shields. They are the practices of a celebrant, with masks, drums, and a trumpet so long that it could easily outstrip the trumpeter.

Oh, and what a universe it is. Buddhism has had its appeal to Westerners like Herman Hesse for its simplicity, especially in the spirit of the 1960s. It has seemed to tell a very human story, of the man who walked away from worldly temptations to become Siddhartha (or he who has achieved his goal) and the Buddha. Here you will encounter the five Buddhas, countless gods, their retinue, and their consorts. By that point, you may need an intercessor, and this form of Buddhism has plenty. They include goddesses, but also bodhisattvas, those who have achieved enlightenment but not yet become gods.

If they sound foreign to the jealous gods of the West, just wait until you meet them. They can be protectors, a source of hope as your karma determines who you will become in the next life. After a couple of centuries of Himalayan Buddhism, they begin to offer hope, too, to escape the endless cycle of reincarnation. Still, the most merciful gods are the ones with deadly weapons in the battle for enlightenment. But then the most austere in reputation are the sexiest. By all means, then, grab a map.

The Met has only a room for mandalas, off to the side. Rather, the show’s three main stages introduce the gods, the intercessors, and the rituals. The curator, Kurt Behrendt, sees them as getting you comfortable with the cast of characters before you reach the show’s true subject. In effect, they are maps to the maps. They all surround a central atrium with its own payoff—murals and carpets by a contemporary artist, Tenzing Rigdol. They present calm seas and rising or sinking suns in gloriously bright colors. They offer space to breathe and a place to rest.

Traditional paintings and sculpture are packed with detail. Ten heads rise up from one deity’s shoulders while samples of a thousand arms fan out. Patterns lend color—a predominant red, but alternating with blue, yellow, and green. A sun-struck yellow may serve as skin tone, but so may blue, sometimes faded to black. Pigment applied directly or mixed with glue, as distemper, adds intensity. The works may date back to the eleventh century, but they peak around 1350.

No question they take adjustments from ignorant Westerners like me. The cells of color flatten surfaces, but gods have a turn at the waist almost like Renaissance contrapposto, which announced a new humanism and a new approach to mass, motion, and depth. That turn at the waist can approach a dance as well, sometimes a wild one. Surviving practices include human dancers with loose robes and demonic, animal, or downright comic heads. All of these are about as far as can be from Chinese art or a show last year of not so early Buddhism. You may wish for more, like, say, mandalas traced in sand, but you could never have imagined a distinct north Asian universe.

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

“God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion.” Thomas Jefferson was speaking of Shays’s Rebellion, an uprising seeking debt relief and back wages from the Revolutionary War, but the Met is well ahead of his schedule in reconceiving history.

Not twelve years after reopening its American wing, the museum celebrates the wing’s centennial with a new look for American art.

In truth, it is less than a revolution. The painting galleries have nominal themes, but with due respect for movements, artists, and their times. Other changes have been in the works for years. One still enters through a bank facade, although the Met has long since added its own money maker, a popular café. One can hardly help entering onto rooms for Native American art, once sorely neglected, along with other rooms for “founding narratives” (aka period rooms). Allow me, then, to offer once more my personal guided tour from January 2012, starting here.

A gilded eagle had an unlikely flight. William Rush carved it in 1809 and 1810, for a Lutheran church in Philadelphia, where it supported a sounding board behind the pulpit with its iron tongue. By mid-century it had come to rest in Independence Hall, not far from Rush’s own statue of Washington. Now, still suspended by a chain and still atop its gilded sphere, it presides over the first room in the Met’s new American wing, which soars.

Of course, its meaning has changed—from an attribute of Saint John to the American eagle to the spirit of American art. Rush understood national symbols all along, though, and so does the Met. It centers the wing on a single floor for painting and sculpture, from the colonial era to the Ashcan school. And it centers that floor on its hoariest display of patriotism, Emanuel Leutze’s life-size Washington Crossing the Delaware. It does so with a knowing wink at its audience, too, like that of Robert Colescott to embody the painting in blackface. The press would not have insisted so often on Leutze as icon rather than art without the museum’s prompting.

Of course, too, the painting is storytelling, and the renovation is telling stories as well. Lots of them, in fact, and they overlap. By bringing painting together on one floor, the Met sets out American history as a series of unfolding themes. The same characters often reappear in new roles, as artists or as subjects. By moving the Ashcan painters here as well, it also says that the evolution of American themes did not end abruptly with Modernism. The museum gets to boast of its collection as at once authoritative and open-ended, and it makes for a terrific reintroduction to American art.

The American wing took its present shape less than thirty years ago, with the museum’s first distinct galleries for painting and sculpture. The Met could simply have shut the place down and started over, as it did for Islam. Instead, change has come gradually over ten years, with a reopening in stages since 2007. The new painting galleries merely complete the job. The basic architecture has not changed either, although the firm of Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo has found another three thousand or so square feet of display space. Yet this time small changes matter big time.

From changing images of Washington to changing images of the wilderness and the city, Met does not just present a history. It makes painting look good, by making paintings look at each other. It places sculpture in almost every room, from portrait busts to duck decoys. It shows the American eagle still in flight, not quite ready to land, with the textbook triumph of American painting another fifty years away. With luck, the wing’s stories will keep changing. Will Washington Crossing the Delaware be their centerpiece forever?

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