KEY POINTS:
At the heart of the National Gallery's tribute to Siena, a group of paintings of classical and biblical heroes and heroines dominates one of the side rooms. The works - each in oil on a single vertical plank of poplar - are grouped into two sets: four male figures and four female. All were commissioned for a bedroom altar display for the Siena townhouse of the powerful Spannocchi family.
Alexander the Great, Joseph of Egypt, Scipio and Tiberius Gracchus pose grandly beside Judith, Artemesia, Sulpitia and Claudia Quinta in front of backdrops that illustrate elements of their life stories: Alexander with his tents and armies; Scipio freeing a Carthaginian princess enslaved by his army; and Judith, saviour of the city of Bethulia, holding the head of the Assyrian general whom she decapitated as he lay in a drunken stupor.
The eight are intended to embody bravery, virtue and proper behaviour to members of the opposite sex - hence their use as bedroom art. Not that it matters: the paintings' artistic and moral qualities are not the issue here. It is their provenance.
By the end of the 18th century, works like these, which highlighted exemplary conduct and morality using stories from ancient Greece or the Old Testament, were at the nadir of their popularity. The two panels were broken up and their eight sections sold separately. A grand artistic diaspora then ensued with the paintings eventually ending up in museums across Europe and the United States. Now, for the first time in more than 200 years, the eight figures have been reunited and displayed more or less as they were conceived.
The effect is compelling. Grouped together, you can see the confident craftsmanship and elegant composition that were employed. Each character stands in a distinctive, slightly stiff pose which appears to be typical of the anonymous artist responsible for at least four of the works. (He is known merely as the Master of the Story of Griselda - the story being a sequence of paintings, again commissioned by the Spannocchis and also displayed in the exhibition, that was the most distinctive early work of this unknown painter.) Heroes and Heroines make a ravishing sight and curator Luke Syson deserves praise for giving us a chance to see it.
Indeed, the opportunity to view the Spannocchi family's heroic paintings is worth the exhibition's £9 ($24) admission on its own. Put them alongside the other 100 exhibits, all from 1460 to 1530, and you have a real bargain - for, if nothing else, we can admire a group of painters and sculptors who have been consistently misunderstood and under-appreciated for centuries.
While the works here are rare, the show's real importance is the fresh perspective it offers on Italian art history, the way it challenges the idea that Florence was the single mainstay of the Renaissance. Admittedly, when you think of the great rebirth of European art, your mind usually runs through a galaxy of Florentine stars from Giotto to Michelangelo. The Sienese would be lucky to get a mention. In effect, theirs is the story of a lost renaissance. Hence the special nature of this exhibition.
Siena's problem was that its population was severely depleted when the Black Death spread across Italy in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. The city had flourished artistically in earlier medieval times but, after the Plague, its citizens were left - in the words of Alfonso V, the King of Naples - "like the inhabitants of the middle floor of a shaky house, tormented by the piss of their neighbours upstairs and smoked out by the people below". It's not a comfortable image.
Thus Florence grabbed the glory though art in Siena was by no means moribund - which is, of course, the key point that Syson is trying to establish here. And one or two of the artists he has collected do turn out to be real stars. Consider Domenico Beccafumi. Several of his works are displayed here and two cry out for special mention. The first is The Stigmatisation of Saint Catherine of Siena. Clearly painted at speed, it achieves startling economy and movement through the golden lines of its haloes and stigmata, emanating like rays from Christ's body to strike the kneeling saint. These were scratched, deep into the paint by Beccafumi, using the end of his brush like a knife.
Similarly, a small panel, titled Saint Jerome, shows the penitent hermit kneeling in a gloomy, mist-filled glade with an animal, possibly a lion, peering out timidly from behind his cloak. The effect is almost surreal. Both works mark out Beccafumi as a painter far ahead of his day.
Jerome and Catherine were popular saints in Siena, and another coup for Syson has been to persuade the city to lend him an exquisitely crafted life-sized wooden statue of the latter, painted in rich black and yellow, that gazes down, in a rather melancholy manner, on visitors as they enter the exhibition's first room. The real attraction of this exhibition is the rarity of the works on display and the light its sheds on European cultural heritage.
- Observer
