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The picture glows in the dark, small but incandescent. It shows three men by the shore. Two are in a boat, trawling the sea with a net, delicately visible beneath the surface. The other stands on a rock, inviting them to follow him in an atmosphere of glimmering gold air. Fish swim straight at you, head on through translucent green waters, as the boatmen turn in amazement at the speaking gestures of Christ. Everything is fluid, mobile, elemental.
Duccio painted this panel for the spectacular double-sided altarpiece installed with immense pageantry in Siena Cathedral in 1311. The scene is from Saint Luke. The front of the altar is still in the city, but these wooden back panels were hacked apart in the 18th century – some lost, possibly destroyed, others scattered across the globe. Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 unites eight long-separated paintings from as far afield as Texas, New York and Madrid, along with many other radiant wonders. The show is as beautiful as it is transformational.
Fifty years in 14th-century Siena may not sound electrifying, but it is. A magical transition occurs in this circular city. Men, women and children, dogs and donkeys, saints and sinners all start to come alive, entering into our world of emotion and expression, uncertainty, love and action. Painting quickens with humanity.
The show opens – dramatically, emblematically – with an icon from the previous century. Stiff and hieratic, this Virgin and Child is riddled with holes. At first it seems as if woodworm has invaded, until you notice the jewel-encrusted golden overlay once screwed into the image that hangs alongside. Only the hand, like a metal votive, carries any trace of maternal feeling.
Mother and child – the infant clutching a tight handful of veil, check to cheek or gazing fascinated upwards, as if spotted outside a Sienese cafe after Sunday mass – is a sight you see all through this show. But Duccio has the most stirring insights. Mary lies uncomfortably on one side, knee raised, recovering from her agonising labour. Baby Jesus flails his little legs against the prospect of a bath. In one scene, she balances him in the crook of her arm, not quite meeting his eyes because she knows the desperate future. An airborne angel gestures to the scene below with an infinitesimally small finger: look, he says to his feathered friends, it all came true!
Duccio (his exact dates unknown) has the most graphic compassion. Look at the bystanders watching the raising of Lazarus with shock, awe, even bewildered dismay. The man nearest the grave holds a cloak to his offended nose. Christ’s imminent healing of the blind man is implied by his startled yet still woefully crossed eyes. The Wedding at Cana is so small and precise: no groom or guests, just the holy entourage and the miracle happening live.
One servant is carefully pouring clear water into jugs – Tuscan majolica – while another pours the jugs into glasses and lo, the liquid comes out as red wine. Jesus is visibly annoyed with Mary, seated next to him, for getting him to pull off this hospitality miracle.
Duccio may have taught the other pioneering stars of this show: Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers. Martini’s theatre runs all the way from tragedy to high comedy. His painting of Saint John – red-haired, hazel-eyed, jaw tense, face a rictus of grief at the sight of Christ on the cross – ripples with distress, even down to the tremble of his garments.
But who else has painted Christ Discovered in the Temple with more humour? The boy Jesus is in a massive strop, arms furiously folded, as Joseph brings him home to his desperate mother. Where have you been? she implores; and you can hear his answer: out with people who are nothing like you.
Pietro Lorenzetti and his younger brother Ambrogio worked on every scale. A small diptych condenses Christ’s story into a pair of hinged pictures: cradled by the Virgin on the left, crucified on the right. You could hold it open like a book. But Pietro’s Cut-Out Crucifix is conversely huge: the emaciated body drooping on its cross – literally made of wood – hair cascading downwards, towards an eerily sighted skull at the foot. Midway between two and three dimensions, it casts a lifesize shadow.
So many of these works are objects as well as images, made to be carried aloft or pored over in private. Some of the smallest works are presented here behind ledges so that you can look deep into each scene. An entire gallery is devoted to textiles, but at least it’s fascinating to see the very silks in which the Christ child is got up like a spoilt little princeling in one picture. A wall text points out that Sienese sumptuary laws banned such opulence. Jesus is dressed in forbidden Sunday best.
It all gets more pink, blue and gold towards the end. Ambrogio’s Mary is not just rosy and curvaceous but wearing a gold crown and matching earrings. By the time you get to the National Gallery’s own Wilton Diptych, ingeniously included, it’s easy to believe that the unknown painter of that magnificent fusion of delicate portraiture and shining gold must have seen some Sienese painting.
So few of Duccio’s works survive, it is a marvel to see so many here. His devil is a hairy black politician trying to tempt a stern Christ, first on a balcony, then out in the Tuscan landscape, Siena a pink doll’s house over which they clamber. The artist’s weeping Virgin is herself cradled (as Christ once was) by the tenderest companions at the crucifixion. And when Jesus returns as a vision, his blood turns into blazing scarlet wings: a feat of pure imagination.
Not just how scenes might have looked, but how they felt to the protagonists in heart, mind and body: that is what Sienese art gives to the world. But by 1350, almost all of these artists will be dead. The Black Death sets in, carrying off more than a third of Siena’s population. What you see in this epochal show is a golden moment in art, before the city’s streets fall silent and empty.
