Boom times in Florence

The city-state of Florence in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries was a city on the rise. Urbanization was experienced by all Italian cities at this time and Florence’s population doubled in size. But more than almost any other town, Florence saw an explosion in international trade and innovations in finance. A new class of bankers and merchants replaced the old noble families as the center of power, developing a complex, barely democratic social structure that hung in a careful balance.

Art and architecture helped define the relationships between individuals and the bewildering array of civic, professional, and religious institutions that made up the fabric of Florentine society. Thanks to the city’s newfound wealth, impressive communal building projects were undertaken, like the building of a new seat of government, the Palazzo della Signoria.

Church and state

During this building boom, church and state were anything but separate. Public funds were used to erect many of the religious centers, including the cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore. Subsidies were even given over to the large new churches needed to accommodate growing audiences for the sermons of the mendicant orders (monks that had forsaken worldly possessions and that lived and preached in the cities). The largest of these mendicant behemoths were the Franciscan church of Santa Croce and the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella.

Guilds and private patrons, too

Happily, the decoration of buildings throughout the city fell to a widening range of patrons. Professional guilds (somewhat like our trade unions) were often in charge of decorating public spaces with painting and, increasingly, architectural sculpture. Groups of priests, nuns, and confraternities (organizations of laypeople that gathered to perform acts of charity or sing hymns) hired artists to create devotional images and lavish books of hymns. For the first time, wealthy individuals and families could even purchase the rights to use and decorate chapels within a church.

A more personal spirituality

But art was not all about public displays of wealth or works of communal beautification. Faith and spirituality became more deeply personal even as they became more public. More than in previous centuries, images played an important role in focusing a person’s devotion to Christ, Mary and the saints—in imagining their lives or picturing how they might appear in all their heavenly glory. In fact, images didn’t just maintain relationships within Florentine society, they built imagined relationships between viewers and the sacred figures they portrayed. This affected more than just the amount of art people needed; it affected what they wanted it to look like. And in the course of the fourteenth century, what they wanted it to look like would change dramatically.

The Italo-Byzantine style

Like the art of most Italian cities at the time, thirteenth-century art in Florence was heavily influenced by Byzantine art (the art of the Byzantine Empire). Images from this period are in fact often described as “Italo-Byzantine,” a label that reflects how artists such as Coppo di Marcovaldo (and many more artists whose names we don’t know) adapted the foreign style into something altogether Italian.

In painting, this meant emulating the way figures were strongly outlined against glittering gold backgrounds like those seen in Byzantine icons and mosaics. These ornate images seem to directly engage the viewer by pressing whatever is being depicted by the artist to the surface of the painting or mosaic. Figures are formed out of abstract but expressive shapes designed to identify various body parts or items of clothing while creating beautiful patterns. In narrative images, each story plays out across the field of representation instead of within it, eliminating the need for a sense of depth.

A new style emerges

During the late thirteenth century, artists in a handful of Italian cities began to move away from the Italo-Byzantine style. The Roman artist Pietro Cavallini created frescoes and mosaics featuring solid, monumentalizing figures; the sculptor Nicola Pisano studied ancient Roman sculpture; Sienese artists seem to have broken new ground in exploring perspective.

Meanwhile, back in Florence, Cimabue’s paintings showed more interest in depicting space and modeling figures with gradations of light and shade. These ideas spread as artists travelled throughout Italy and southern France in search of work, creating a network of artistic centers that all exerted influence on one another.

Giotto

As the new century opened, the painter Giotto di Bondone observed many of these currents and forged them into something distinctively Florentine and enormously influential.

Where earlier works of art engage us with the embellished splendor of the heavenly, Giotto’s paintings capture our attention by representing holy figures and stories as if in a majestic but earthly realm. Bold modeling of draperies and the bodies beneath them gives his figures greater volume and a sense of sculptural relief. Clever kinds of perspective create the illusion that a space is opening up in front of the viewer, as if we might be peering onto a stage.

Perhaps just as importantly, Giotto was a master of visual storytelling—a skill evident in his most important surviving project, the frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua (c. 1305). Here the monumentality of the figures, the quiet dignity of their movements, and the way architectural and landscape settings seem to echo the action all conjure up a solemn aura of the sacred. Like many of the narrative paintings attributed to Giotto, the scenes use closely observed human gestures and careful composition to enhance the drama and emotion of the moment depicted.

Art after Giotto

Giotto had an enormous workshop full of students and assistants, making it hard to tell which works he painted and which were by his pupils. Even more confusingly, his style was so immediately influential that it is still difficult to say who his formal students were. What we do know is that, in the years immediately after his death, the artists who were the most “Giottesque” received the lion’s share of the important commissions for new projects. The success of artists like Bernardo Daddi, Maso di Banco, and Taddeo Gaddi demonstrates that wealthy patrons were on board with Giotto’s new vision for art.

Sometime around mid-century, though, certain artists began to drift from the clear, spare art of Giotto’s school. Many experimented with visually crowded compositions or with complex subjects represented through elaborate symbols and schemes. Some even seem to have purposefully echoed the ornamental, formal art of the Italo-Byzantine period. This has led art historians to wonder whether these changes in style were caused by Florence’s collective despair after the outbreak of the bubonic plague—a sickness that wiped out over half the city’s population in one year alone (1348).

Most scholars now think the situation was more mixed than this theory might lead us to believe. In fact, late fourteenth-century art is hard to generalize. This is partly because no single workshop dominated the art of Florence as much as Giotto and his school had in previous decades. But it is also because artists of the time were skilled at adapting their own style to the specific tastes of each patron and to the context and function of each image.

Overall, however, Florentine art from 1348 to 1400 did not experience the same kind of major stylistic shift that characterized Giotto’s years on the scene. Rather, the fundamental influence of Giotto continued into the early 1400s. In the end, the long fourteenth-century was Giotto’s century.

Cite this page as: Dr. Joanna Milk Mac Farland, “Florence in the Late Gothic period, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, December 30, 2015, accessed June 5, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/florence-in-the-late-gothic-period-an-introduction/.

Siena: A city overlooked?

For centuries, Siena’s role in the history of European art was under-appreciated. This is partly because its moment of greatest influence occurred just before the Renaissance, a period commonly associated with the nearby city of Florence (both Florence and Siena were independent city-states in Italy at this time). But history—even art history—is written by the victors. So when Siena’s position of power faded while Florence remained one of the financial and artistic centers of Europe, the achievements of Sienese artists slid slowly into the background.

Art historians now know that the development of style in these two city-states was closely intertwined. The artists of one inevitably influenced the other, even in later periods. It is not an exaggeration to say that, at the height of its artistic flourishing, Siena was unsurpassed in its fame for producing celebrated painters.

An international city

By the early fourteenth century, Siena was a wealthy and cosmopolitan city. Several large international banks were run by wealthy Sienese families. Merchants based in Siena traded goods in several foreign countries, particularly France. The city’s location on the Via Francigena, the main pilgrimage route to Rome, meant that pilgrims from all over Europe streamed through its streets. These pilgrims would have been greeted by one of the most impressive cityscapes in Italy at the time. Spread out over three hills, the skyline was dominated by the enormous cathedral and by the central seat of government, the Palazzo Pubblico.

Communal oversight of the arts

Like many cities today, the Sienese were acutely aware of how art and architecture shaped the city’s identity in the eyes of both natives and visitors. The communal government was controlled by the “Nove,” or the Nine, a rotating group of representatives chosen from the city’s leading families. The Nove dominated art patronage during the period, helping to decide the layout of the city and its largest buildings, selecting committees to oversee large public projects, and subsidizing the decoration of churches.

Sienese art of the period was communally oriented in a few other ways. The central government and various churches hired local Sienese artists, almost exclusively, to produce the most important paintings. Such a preference for native sons hints at a general pride in the city’s painters, known throughout Italy for the quality of their work (this was not the case with sculpture). There were also a few examples of large works of art created for private individuals. Compare this to Florence at the time, where rich citizens often bought the right to decorate family chapels in large churches and where painters from other cities were sometimes awarded prestigious commissions.

Duccio

In fact, the most famous Sienese artist of the fourteenth century may have first made a name for himself in Florence. The earliest recorded work by Duccio, an artist who is often called the father of Sienese painting, was commissioned for the church of Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

This nearly fifteen-foot tall altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child introduced Duccio’s innovative style to a wider audience. Like previous artists, Duccio was interested in creating beautiful patterns and shapes. We can see the love of surface decoration in the undulating arrangements of fabric or even in the faces of his figures. Yet he also used soft modeling with light and shade to give a sense of mass in the figures’ delicate but real bodies. Duccio’s ability to combine elegant lines and patterns with a fragile naturalism became a hallmark of Sienese painting.

The Maestà

The Santa Maria Novella altarpiece must have won Duccio fame in his own city of Siena, for he soon became a favorite painter of the commune. In 1308, he was asked to create a massive painting for the main altar in the middle of the Cathedral. The front of the altarpiece depicted the Madonna and Child sitting on a throne and surrounded by saints and angels, a subject known in Italian as a Maestà. Originally, the main scene was at the center of a set of stories and figures, all united in an elaborate wooden structure of frames covered in gold leaf. The back of the altarpiece was painted with a series of scenes from the life of Christ. Unfortunately, these panels are now dispersed in many museums. In these panels, Duccio demonstrated his unsurpassed skills of visual storytelling, capturing the imagination of contemporary viewers with his vivid depictions of the gospel stories that were so central to the faith of Siena and its visitors.

Cathedral altarpieces

It is hard to overestimate how important Duccio’s altarpiece was for the citizens who worshiped in front of it and for the artists who studied it. The city had long ago dedicated itself to the Virgin Mary, believing her to be their special protector. In an age where painted images gave faithful viewers a channel of access to celestial figures, the Maestà became the central representation of Siena’s powerful patron as the queen of heaven.

The work’s role as a devotional and artistic well for the city was most eloquently honored in four altarpieces painted for the chapels surrounding Duccio’s painting. Each altarpiece depicted a scene involving Mary, so that the story of her life would have unfolded as your eye travelled along the chapels. Over the course of two decades, one altarpiece was commissioned from each of the leading Sienese painters of the day, transforming the heart of the Cathedral into something like a gallery of the great Sienese artists. This is a perfect illustration of the city’s tendency to blend devotional piety and civic pride in large artistic projects.

Simone Martini

Perhaps the best known of these four altarpieces is the Annunciation by Simone Martini. Building on the legacy of Duccio, Simone was also influenced by the elongated, swaying figures and elaborate architectural forms of northern European art. On the other hand, his paintings show a bit more of the kind of careful observation of the world around him that we might associate with Giotto, the leading Florentine artist at the time. Thanks to this eclectic but refined mixing of new styles, Simone’s reputation and influence spread throughout Europe, a legacy carried on by a large workshop of assistants and students.

The Lorenzetti brothers

Two of the other three artists hired to paint altarpieces behind the Maestà were actually brothers: Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti. While the Lorenzetti brothers worked in the Sienese style, they absorbed the art of Giotto more fully than Simone Martini and his followers did. Weighty, massive figures covered in heavy drapery populate their works, a sure sign of their familiarity with Florentine painting. Even more than Giotto and his school, both Ambrogio and Pietro experimented with using different kinds of perspective to give an illusion of depth in the spaces their figures occupy.

Good and bad government

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s artistic innovation is best captured in one of the most groundbreaking works of the late medieval period: his wall paintings in the Palazzo Pubblico. The elaborate murals were designed to remind the Nove of the consequences of good and bad governance. The scenes are particularly known for their large, sensitively depicted landscapes and cityscapes. No other monumental celebration of everyday urban and rural life survives from the period, making these scenes a turning point in the history of art.

After the Black Death

As in Florence, perhaps half of Siena’s population died of the plague in 1348. Scholars think the Lorenzetti brothers were two of the Black Death’s victims. Since Simone Martini had died a few years earlier in Avignon, this meant all four of Siena’s greatest artists were now dead.

Art continued to lie at the center of the city’s image of itself and its religious life. For the remainder of the century, artists such as Bartolomeo Bulgarini worked in the style forged by their forbears, though with less international acclaim. As scholars have emphasized in recent decades, Sienese art was later reinvigorated during the Renaissance, incorporating an array of new artistic styles into their own strong traditions. Still, to this day the city looks back to the early fourteenth century as a golden age for Sienese art.

Cite this page as: Dr. Joanna Milk Mac Farland, “Siena in the Late Gothic, an introduction,” in Smarthistory, December 30, 2015, accessed June 5, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/siena-in-the-late-gothic-an-introduction/.