Author Description

For almost five hundred years, from the late Middle Ages into the seventeenth century, the Italian city of Siena was a thriving center of trade, learning, and fine art. This book is the first to celebrate its influential and impressive artistic heritage. Siena's distinctive style of painting was created in the early fourteenth century by such masters as Duccio di Buoninsegna and Simone Martini, emphasizing brilliant color, elaborate pattern, and elegant goldwork. Soon after, in the middle of the century, the gifted brothers Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti introduced a new feeling for space, weight, and volume to their figures, and, following the example of the Florentine master Giotto, the emphatic expression of individual personalities. The Lorenzettis were also the first Italian masters of landscape painting. In the sixteenth century, the Sienese artist Sodoma traveled to Rome to work with Raphael for the Sienese cardinal Chigi, and later Domenico Beccafumi became one of the driving forces of Italian Mannerism. In the seventeenth century, such superb artists as Francesco Vanni and Ventura Salimbeni helped create the great heritage of Italian Baroque art. This book is the first comprehensive survey of painting in Siena from the emergence of its earliest distinctive style in the mid-1200s to its refined late Baroque manner.