Simone Martini
The elegant master of International Gothic.
Simone Martini of Siena also worked for the papal court in Avignon. His Annunciation with its gold ground is one of the most refined images of the Gothic era.
Simone Martini was born in Siena around 1284. He grew up in Duccio’s shadow and is thought to have trained in his circle. Early on, however, he developed a style of his own, more refined and worldly, and influenced by French Gothic art with its sweeping lines.
His first major work is the Maestà fresco in Siena’s town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico, from 1315. It shows the Virgin beneath a canopy, surrounded by saints, and was a secular counterpart to Duccio’s altarpiece in the cathedral. Shortly afterwards he worked for King Robert of Naples and painted an altarpiece of St Louis of Toulouse, the king’s brother. The panel is now in Naples. In the Lower Church at Assisi he painted a chapel with scenes from the life of St Martin. His most famous work is the Annunciation of 1333, painted together with his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi for Siena Cathedral and now in the Uffizi.
The Annunciation shows what Simone Martini was about. The angel Gabriel arrives in a fluttering, chequered cloak, and his words to the Virgin are tooled into the gold ground itself. Mary shrinks back with a twist that is both shy and elegant. The lines are soft and sweeping, the fabrics costly and the colours clear. It is an art for connoisseurs and princes, full of gold detail and punched patterns.
In 1324 Simone married Giovanna, sister of the painter Lippo Memmi, and the two families worked together. Around 1336 he moved to the papal court in Avignon. There he became a friend of the poet Petrarch, who writes about him in his poems and tells us that he painted a portrait of Petrarch’s beloved Laura. The portrait is lost. A frontispiece that he painted for Petrarch’s manuscript of Virgil, however, survives in Milan. He died in Avignon in 1344.
Through his years in Avignon his elegant style spread to artists from northern Europe. He thus became one of the originators of the so-called International Gothic, which shaped court art in Europe around 1400.