Duccio di Buoninsegna

Duccio was the first and perhaps the greatest of the religious painters of medieval Siena, then the capital of one of Italy’s northern city states. His work sums up the highly formal tradition inherited from the eastern civilization of Byzantium, but it is also more realistic and more natural. In the Middle Ages, when artists had been content to follow the Byzantine tradition, their principal aim was to express their strong religious beliefs in a highly decorative and spiritual way. Their figures were two-dimensional, and they made little attempt to represent them accurately or realistically. Duccio introduced something new: his work marks a turning point in that it began to express the idea that a body has life, and it moves in a particular way. This achievement had a profound effect on the Sienese painters who followed him.

In 1285 he painted The Rucellai Madonna, a large work named after the aristocratic Rucellai family of Florence, who probably commissioned it and in whose private chapel it was placed in the church of Santa Maria Novella. The characteristics of Byzantine art can be seen to persist in its decorative formality: the Madonna and the Holy Child face towards us, the figures stylized and rather stiff’ against the gold background. The throne is an elaborate structure, its architectural features symbolizing the Christian Church. But there is a new liveliness and movement in the angels clinging to the throne. The gilded border of the Virgin’s dark blue robe flows down and across the painting, following the contours of her body and suggesting that it covers a living, three-dimensional figure, not just a painted representation.

Colour as well as line was significant in Duccio’s work. He used it to create a harmonious scheme, rather than just to define the separate figures; and here the variations in the angels’ robes — light blue and rose, green and pale violet — make a glowing pattern. The Virgin was traditionally portrayed in blue as it was an expensive pigment, and its use implied reverence and respect; it also denoted purity since it is the colour of the sky and therefore of heaven. The figures are surrounded by a gilded frame decorated with medallions of saints and prophets.

Above all, this devotional painting heralded a gradual new development in the art of Siena. The beginnings of a new humanity and warmth pervade its grave and austere beauty, and Duccio has conveyed deep religious feeling in a far more accessible way than did the art of the Byzantine masters who preceded him.