Duccio di Buoninsegna
Siena’s great painter.
Duccio’s Maestà, a huge altarpiece for Siena Cathedral, was carried through the city in procession in 1311. He combined Byzantine splendour with the elegant lines of the Gothic.
Duccio di Buoninsegna was born in Siena around 1255. His training is unknown, but he must have studied Byzantine models closely, and he may have known Cimabue’s work in Florence. He is first mentioned in the Sienese archives in 1278. Over the following forty years he became the city’s leading painter.
His first major commission came in 1285 from a religious confraternity in Florence. It was a large Madonna for the church of Santa Maria Novella. The panel is known as the Rucellai Madonna and now hangs in the Uffizi, alongside Madonnas by Cimabue and Giotto. It was long attributed to Cimabue, until a surviving contract showed that Duccio was the master. His principal work is the Maestà, the vast altarpiece for Siena Cathedral. It was commissioned in 1308 and in 1311 was carried amid celebrations from the workshop to the cathedral.
The Maestà has two sides. The front shows the Virgin enthroned, surrounded by angels and saints. The back tells the story of Christ’s Passion in a large number of small scenes. This is where Duccio’s strength shows: he arranges the figures so that the action is easy to follow, and he gives them gestures and glances that carry the story. The colours are clear and luminous, and the gold lends everything a heavenly radiance. The altarpiece was dismantled in 1771 and sawn apart. Most of it is now in the cathedral museum in Siena, but individual panels are held elsewhere, including the National Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The archives also give a picture of the man. Duccio was fined several times, among other things for debts and for refusing to swear an oath, and he left his family in debt. How far this reflects his personality, however, is hard to say.
Duccio founded Sienese painting, marked by elegance, warm colour and a delight in storytelling. Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti built on his legacy. Where Giotto in Florence stressed weight and drama, Duccio showed how beauty and narrative could be combined.