Glowing in the dark

The latest exhibition in the grim dungeon of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing actually looks rather splendid. After a slow start, this tribute to later Renaissance Siena blossoms forth — despite the dim lighting — into real magnificence. It brings together more than a hundred exhibits, mostly paintings and drawings, but including sculpture, ceramics and manuscripts, in a well-designed and skilfully installed display which focuses on the Sienese achievement from 1460 to 1530.

I suppose if people think of Sienese painters, they think of Duccio, the Lorenzetti brothers, Simone Martini and Sassetta, all of whom were dead before the period covered by this exhibition begins. Renaissance art history is dominated by Vasari’s monumental Lives of the Artists, and, as an adopted Florentine and thus sworn enemy of the Sienese, he tended to discount and deny the very considerable achievement of the painters of Siena. Effectively, such artists as make up this show were written out of history by being ignored — they are not in the standard accounts. And the latest study that I read (and very much enjoyed), Sienese Painting: The Art of a City-Republic, 1278–1477 by Timothy Hyman, also stops short of the period here under discussion. So with this show we are entering largely unfamiliar territory. All the more reason now to make it a place of pilgrimage, for it’s a beautiful and moving display.

The first room introduces the city and its saints, for both play a large, not to say domineering, part in the iconography of the local art. The very first painting is ‘The Virgin recommends Siena to Pope Calixtus III’ by Sano di Pietro, in which the tiny pink-walled city with its distinctive black-and-white striped Cathedral is dwarfed by the Pope and the Virgin.