Premiered Oct 24, 2024 through January 26, 2025. Metropolitan Museum of Art
Art Show of the Season reveals the religious power of viewing art
The magnificent glow-in-the-dark exhibition called “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a visual event of pure 24-karat beauty and a multileveled scholarly coup. On both counts, we’ll be lucky if the season brings us anything like its equal.
Museums seem to have developed a problem with presenting religious art, as if unsure of what to do with it, how to pitch it. This isn’t true for non-Western work — from Africa, say, or Asia — which can still be spun as loosely and exotically “spiritual.” But Western religious art, specifically Christian art, which fits less and less comfortably into an increasingly secularizing public culture, is different. We may now be in a position of knowing it both too well, and not well enough.
In addition, devotional objects, from any culture, if taken seriously, make awkward demands on our attention, on our willingness or ability to meet them on their own terms.
Devotional paintings and sculptures are, by design, interactive instruments. You look at them and, the assumption behind them is, they also look at you. You speak; they listen, and in time respond. Touch them (though not at the Met!), and the touch is reciprocal.
They’re energy-absorbers and transmitters. Devotion directed at them becomes part of them, vivifying them. In places of worship — churches, shrines — you can easily sense this, but in an art museum, you have to make an effort to adjust your viewing habits, your expectations. The Met show, with its charismatic display of gilded altarpieces spotlighted against black risers, encourages you to do just that. What the show also does, in somewhat against-the-grain fashion, is give full attention to a style of art that has sometimes been assigned supporting status in the historical canon. → from Holland Carter’s “Art Show of the Season? It’s These Centuries-Old Italian Paintings” in The New York Times, October 17, 2024.
The Video
Join Stephan Wolohojian, John Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of the Department of European Paintings, and Caroline Campbell, Director (An Stiúrthóir) of the National Gallery of Ireland, to virtually explore Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350.
This exhibition examines an exceptional moment at the dawn of the Italian Renaissance and the pivotal role of Sienese artists—including Duccio, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Simone Martini—in defining Western painting.
In the decades leading up to the catastrophic onset of the plague around 1350, Siena was the site of phenomenal artistic innovation and activity. While Florence is often positioned as the center of the Renaissance, this presentation offers a fresh perspective on the importance of Siena, from Duccio’s profound influence on a new generation of painters to the development of narrative altarpieces and the dissemination of artistic styles beyond Italy.
Drawing on the outstanding collections of The Met and the National Gallery, London, as well as rare loans from dozens of other major lenders, the exhibition includes more than 100 works by a remarkable group of Sienese artists. It features paintings alongside sculptures, metalwork, and textiles, ranging from large works made for public display to intimate objects created for private devotion. Although none of these artists survived the plague of circa 1350, their achievements had an immeasurable impact on painters and theorists in the centuries that followed.
