The Collected Prose, page 10
Though Duccio was barely one generation older than Giotto, their work seems centuries apart. Both probably studied with Cimabue. The three large Madonnas in the Uffizi—those of Cimabue, Duccio, and Giotto—are, despite all differences, heavy, ripe fruits of the Byzantine tree. The careers of these men, probably friends, were as dissimilar as their characters. Enterprising Giotto rushes between Rome, Assisi, Padua, and Florence. Duccio scarcely leaves his hometown. One can easily imagine the former in a country tavern, downing red wine in great gulps and tearing fat pieces of meat with his thick fingers, which only a moment before painted aureoles over the heads of saints. The latter, a feeble, ascetic man in a tattered coat, takes long, lonely walks, most often north, to a small Sienese hermitage inhabited by parched anchorites.
Only in sexless historical textbooks are both painters treated equally. A critic of defined taste must choose. Berenson aptly calls Duccio the last great painter of antiquity. “His old men are the last descendants, in unbroken line, of the Alexandrian philosophers; his angels are Victories and Genii; his devil is Silenus14.” The American scholar quite rightly stresses the gift of dramatic composition in the Sienese artist. The Betrayal of Judas: “Motionless, in the middle of the foreground, we see the figure of Christ. The slim and supple Judas entwines Him in an embrace, while the lightly clad soldiers lay hands on Him…Meanwhile on the left, hot-tempered Peter rushes at a soldier with his knife…the disciples in a crowded flock scurry away….” Let us add that a crevice like black lightning opens above the heads of the running Apostles. Duccio makes even stones show emotion. The image consists of two large masses of definite compositional and dramatic significance. It is impossible to misinterpret the action.
Despite the decorative quality, excellent pictorial matter and the profound thought of this Christian Sophocles, Duccio (in Berenson’s eyes) does not make the grade of genius. In the case of no other artist are the obvious nineteenth-century taste of this American Florentine and the deficiency of his aesthetic criteria more clearly revealed. Berenson demanded from art an affirmation of life and the material world. He wanted to hear a powerful aria and overlooked the more subtle modulations. He admired tactile values, expressiveness of forms, movement. He praised the masters in whom he noticed a new conception of the solid; thus he exalted Giotto over Duccio. Today, not without the help (yes, yes) of contemporary painting, we are inclined to correct this judgment.
Berenson was the child of a century that valued progress. The “Byzantine” Duccio had to be out-distanced by the “Renaissance” Giotto. But the prominent scholar overlooked at least two important issues.
Duccio did not belong to the category of artists who make spectacular discoveries. He was one of those who produce new syntheses. The latter group is often underrated because they are less expressive. To notice them means to be thoroughly acquainted with their epoch and artistic background. More recent scholars justly noted that the work of the great Sienese brought about the synthesis of two prominent, antithetical cultures: on the one hand, Byzantine neo-Hellenism with its hierarchies and anti-naturalism; and on the other, the Western European—specifically French—Gothic, with its exaltation, naturalism, and inclination towards drama.
Giotto paves the road for the resurrected heritage of the Romans, who after all did not make great contributions to the world of aesthetics. Although he worked two centuries before the discovery of America, it is no anachronism to connect his name with the Renaissance. The European painting that came after him—though no one seems to say this openly—loses contact with the immense, petrified cultural spheres of Europe and Asia. It becomes a great, but local, adventure, unleashing the monster of naturalism. The connection with the great rivers of humanity, the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates, is broken.
Though obviously fascinated by the miniatures of the Paris School, Duccio returns inward, to the roots of culture. Unlike Giotto, he is not a discoverer of new lands but an explorer of sunken islands.
I realized all this much later. At the time, I stood dumbfounded in front of the panel resembling golden stained glass, which tells the story of the lives of Christ and Mary. Forty-five scenes remain in Siena, fourteen were snatched by collectors of the Old and New World.
The radiance of the work is overwhelming. At first I attributed it to the golden background which, perhaps due to bad restoration, cracks, and damaged glaze, is never rigid and homegenous like metal but has its own depths, its shivers and waves, its hot and cold regions lined with greens and cinnabars. To prevent the total disappearance of the colors juxtaposed with the gold, they had to be given supernatural intensity: the leaves are like small sapphires; the hide of the donkey in flight from Egypt is like gray granite; and the snow on the bare, truncated cliffs glitters like mother-of-pearl. The painting of the Duocento is close to the art of the mosaic: a plane encrusted with spots of color which had the hardness of alabaster, of precious stones, of ivory. (Only much later did painted matter begin to slacken: in the Venetians we have skeins of silk, brocade, and muslin; by the Impressionist period, no more than colorful steam.) The scale of color is rich and flamboyant. To find an adequate comparison Focillon reaches beyond Byzantium and calls to his aid Persian gardens and miniatures.
If the Byzantine painters are criticized for their disdain for detail (which for some means a lack of realism), this objection does not apply to Duccio, whose sense of detail was outstanding. In his Wedding at Cana the servings of fish, both the whole and the half-eaten ones, are very concrete. The master does not hesitate to introduce episodes contrary to accepted iconographic convention: for example, Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem is watched by a group of urchins perched on a green grandstand of trees. My favorite painting is The Washing of the Feet. It is the perfect example of the use of a group. Young theatre directors should apprentice themselves to Duccio, and it wouldn’t hurt some older ones either. Pictures by the great Sienese could be put on stage. It is amazing how little use is made in acting schools of these studies of gesture; no wonder that we see stage princes moving like peddlers.
In The Washing of the Feet Duccio builds his drama like a Greek tragedian. He uses only two actors, but in the background he places a chorus commenting on the events. Half of the Apostles look at Christ with adoration, half with reproach. They seem to disapprove of the Master’s act of humility. The detail that never fails to enchant me is the three black sandals: two lie just beside the wooden water bucket and one a bit higher, on the step on which the Apostles are seated. They contrast sharply with the pink background of the floor, and the verb “lie” does not render the nature of their existence in the painting. They are the most alive element in the scene, their diagonal position and their far-flung latchets give an impression of rat-like flight. The disquiet of the sandals contrasts with the pale deadliness of a white curtain, which hangs above the Disciples’ heads like an ominous shroud.
After Duccio, one should look at nothing more, to retain as long as possible the splendor of this masterpiece. It was appreciated by the painter’s contemporaries. The introduction of the Maestà into the cathedral in 1311 is one of the earliest-described homages of ordinary people to a work of art.
“On the day the picture was carried to the cathedral, shops were closed. The Bishop himself led a solemn procession accompanied by the Lords Nine, all the officials of the commune and a great company of priests and the faithful. The townsmen with lighted candles went side by side, trying to take up the places closest to the altar; behind them, with great piety, went women and children. And on their way to the cathedral they walked around the Campo as they were wont; and all the bells tolled joyfully in honour of the great painting. This picture was painted by Duccio di Buoninsegna, who lived in the house of the Muciatti outside the gate at Stalloreggi. And the whole day was spent in prayer and almsgiving, and they prayed to God and His Holy Mother who is our advocate to defend us in His infinite mercy from all adversity and all evil and to keep us from the hands of traitors and enemies of Siena.”
After Duccio one really has no desire to look at anything else. Even The Three Graces, a copy of Praxiteles, cannot keep one in the museum. Through the scorched square I sneak over to the shady side of Via del Capitano, then to the shady side of Via del Stalloreggi. The heat is unbearable. Just a moment ago I soared on the wings of aesthetic ecstasy; now I want to curse all museums, monuments, and the sun.
At last a trattoria that looks modest enough and is called neither “Excelsior” nor “Continentale.” There is a nice, cellar-like coolness inside mixed with the smell of wine, onions, and hot olive oil. For starters I order spaghetti. This dish as we know is served as an appetizer, as an introduction to the main course. The French start with exciting hors d’oeuvres; the Italians act more reasonably, as required by their peasant cuisine which is excellent and nutritious. The philosophy of taste on the Italian peninsula is based on the principle that one satiate hunger as soon as possible and only then think about more subtle culinary experiences. And anyway, real Italian spaghetti is exquisite, rather tough, served with spicy sauce, sprinkled with parmesan, and must be reeled in on a fork, which gives eating a touch of ritual. Later, one usually has a steak fried in pepper with a quarter of tomato and a lettuce leaf. For dessert, a cool, ripe peach; and all this washed down by a young local wine served like water in large glasses, not in those awkward, silly constructions on glass legs.
Determined to escape the high noon in a cool place, I buy Il Messaggero with a huge photo of Chessman15 on the front page. So it finally happened? The photograph eternalizes the historical moment: Chessman finishes his last cigarette. In the corner of the mouth in this ugly, cynical, tormented face, only a butt smolders.
I must have dozed off since the air has changed from white to amber and the heat begun to lift. I sit on a stone bench near the wall of the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala, which faces the cathedral. The hospital visitors exchange news about the health of their relatives. Nervous gestures and poignant bottles of tea with syrup, sealed with pieces of cloth. The smell of antiseptics from the open hospital gate blows straight into the face of the Duomo.
The cathedral is situated in the most elevated square of the town and is like a tall black and white emblem of the city, a song that soars and falls in the cascade of sculptures, openwork arches, and golden stars. On its left side, a beautiful tower—an angel’s spear resting against the air.
One should not surrender to the dictatorship of guide-books but look at this edifice, one of the most beautiful in the world, with a critical eye. After the first rapture, of course. One should not deny oneself the pleasure of enchantment, and the creators of the façade, among them Giovanni Pisano, did everything to keep us in a state of aesthetic fever.
Many art historians claim that the cathedral in Siena is the most outstanding Gothic building in Italy. But the French say, sneeringly and with ill-concealed indignation, that their style, the Gothic, on the Apennine Peninsula is in fact a Romanesque style with added cross-arched vaults. Three portals of the cathedral are topped with full arches; the tympana16 without sculptures are Romanesque. The battle between the circle and the triangle remains unresolved, and the huge rosette (“O, omega, the violet ray of his eyes17”) in the thicket of ornamental details sounds like a mighty gong in the midst of pipes, flutes, and tiny bells. The influence of Cistercian monks, apostles of the austere Gothic from neighboring San Galgano (one directed the construction of the cathedral in 1257, eleven years after work commenced), is visible in the plan of the building rather than its ornamentation. Pierre du Colombier is right to suggest placing a hand over one’s eyes and splitting the Duomo into two halves, along the line of the cornice above the tympana. The parts, upper and lower, do not harmonize well—as if someone had placed a complex, intricate top on a calm, Romanesque base, trying to force a synthesis of architecture with a reliquary.
One can defend Siena’s Duomo in many ways. The most important argument is that the façade was created over centuries and that nineteenth-century restorers did their best to debase the masterpiece.
Yet it does not diminish the astonishment of someone whose taste for the Gothic was shaped by the cathedrals of the Île-de-France. Luckily cultural transmission does not take place by photographic reproduction.
I close my eyes to call Chartres to mind. I see the soaring gray sandstone. I open my eyes and see the Duomo of Siena; a cloud of pigeons shimmering in the sun—their uneven, circular, slightly leaden flight.
The interior is equally astonishing. Unlike the cathedral in Orvieto, built half a century later, it is not a basilica with a closed roof, but a building on the Cistercian plan. The chancel is cut straight, the walls of the nave are without a triforium18. It is most difficult to get used to the dome in Italian Gothic architecture. Besides, the one in Siena is not very successful, especially seen from outside, and it is hard to understand what function it serves. However, it looks differently from within. In the transept the dome rests on six columns. A glance from a side nave reveals an amazing play of interweaving planes and perspectives, like a remote echo of Ravenna.
Aesthetic purists squirm with outrage at the sight of the Duomo’s plan. How can you combine the plan of a basilica with a central plan? A mistake, hiss the rhetoricians of architecture.
The interior is unusually expressive, not only because of the black and white stripes of stone. The Romantics were well aware of its dramatic quality. When composing Parsifal, Wagner asked the painter Jankowski19 to send him sketches of the Sienese cathedral. In the composer’s imagination this church came closest to the ideal temple of the Holy Grail.
What is the essence of the Gothic? Is it a principle of construction or an aesthetic principle of style? How should we understand the domination of horizontal lines and arcades with full arches? And besides, one’s sight is rooted to the ground by the cathedral’s inlaid floor, the product of an unusual, nearly two-centuries-long effort by numerous artists; three hundred square meters in which one can see the whole development of art, from the linearity of Domenico di Niccola to the painterly treatment of stone by Domenico Beccafumi20.
Moving to the right we pass the black and white birch columns and enter the Piccolomini21 Library. It is one of Siena’s art treasuries, which cannot go unnoticed even by the aesthetically blind, since two guards at the entrance collect an extra charge. The Libreria contains wonderful illuminated manuscripts and ten frescoes representing the life of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, later Pius II. It once held The Three Graces, but a priest incensed by their beautiful nakedness banished them to the museum.
Aeneas Piccolomini is one of the most likeable figures of the Italian Renaissance. A humanist, poet, diplomat, an author of frivolous comedies and Latin dissertations. As was fashionable in his time he wrote about everything from horses to Homer. Portraits of him show the appealing features of a descendant of the Sienese aristocracy: a lover of nature, Virgil, and women. He wrote a kind of anti-Castiglione: The Miserable Lives of Courtiers. “Dinners are always served at the wrong time, and one always feels sick afterwards…the wine is bitter…Frugal princes make their courtiers gulp ale…A mug, which the servants wash once a year, is passed among the table companions, each more revolting than the next…the court holds philosophers and sages in contempt…” To justify this misanthropy let us add that Aeneas stayed not in Urbino, but at a northern court in Germany.
After a turbulent and less than exemplary youth, he took holy orders rather late at forty-one. He severely condemned his own adventures as well as his libertine novel, History of Two Lovers, for which even the most God-abiding biographers tend to excuse him, because of his extremely interesting portrayal of manners. However, having put on his purple robe, Aeneas referred to it with distaste, calling the book Due Dementi.
He was a man of modern times; and like his Roman namesake he inherited a desire for fame. Wishing to correct the error of fate which consigned his birth to the lowly town of Corsignano, he changed its name to Pienza. Within four years he erected in this remote place an amazing cathedral, numerous Renaissance palaces and houses—all with the assistance of the outstanding architect Rossellino and ambitious cardinals competing for his favors. There was also a poet who exalted the fantasy of the Pope in ancient measures. After the death of Pius II, life abandoned Pienza. What remained was a collection of stone-cuttings. An empty town with a moral lesson.
To commemorate this unusual figure, Cardinal Francesco Piccolomini, the nephew of Pius II, ordered ten frescoes portraying the life of his prominent uncle. The author was Pinturicchio.
This exquisite narrator, “never pedantic and never profound,” painted the walls of the Libreria at the mature age of fifty, at the height of his popularity. With Perugino, he was the Pope’s painter-in-residence for many years. A judgment by one of his patrons: “Perugino is the most outstanding master among Italian painters, and with the exception of Pinturicchio, his disciple, no one else deserves an honorable mention.” Modern historians of art are more severe with him and place him, I think rightly, among the highly educated, skillful, and charming painters of the Quattrocento, rewarded by fortune with disciples of genius. Verrochio22 was overshadowed by the work of Leonardo; Ghirlandaio23 by the vision of Michelangelo; Raphael seems the perfect fulfillment of the aspirations of Perugino and Pinturicchio.
Many criticisms can be made of the fresco (which remains in perfect condition, probably because restorers have not touched it), but that doesn’t prevent one from feeling its irresistible charm. Even Berenson, who stuffs Pinturicchio into the inferno of narrators and decorators, in the excellent company of Duccio, Piero della Francesca, and Raphael, cannot resist the fascinating evocation of the outstanding humanist—Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini.
