Painter of the Bible
Duccio di Buoninsegna
Duccio di Buoninsegna stands at the head of the Sienese school and at the threshold between the Italo-Byzantine tradition and the new pictorial language that Giotto was developing in Florence at the same moment.
Life & work
Duccio di Buoninsegna stands at the head of the Sienese school and at the threshold between the Italo-Byzantine tradition and the new pictorial language that Giotto was developing in Florence at the same moment. Born around 1255 in Siena and active there until his death around 1319, he ran the leading workshop of his city for thirty years and trained the generation — Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers — that carried Sienese painting into its golden age. His surviving documented work is small, but every panel matters.
The Maestà, completed in June 1311 for the high altar of Siena Cathedral, is the central monument of medieval Italian painting. A double-sided altarpiece roughly seven meters wide, its main face shows the Virgin Mary enthroned in majesty among angels and saints; the back face contained twenty-six Passion scenes from the Entry into Jerusalem to the appearances of the risen Christ. The cathedral chapter received it on June 9 with a citywide procession that, according to the contemporary chronicler, closed the shops, rang every bell, and ended with a Mass attended by the bishop and the Nine. The altarpiece was sawn apart and dispersed in the eighteenth century; most of the panels are now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo in Siena, with Passion fragments in the National Gallery in London, the Frick Collection in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Earlier in his career he produced the Rucellai Madonna for the Dominicans of Santa Maria Novella in Florence (1285, now in the Uffizi), an enormous gabled panel that demonstrates how a Sienese painter could work for a Florentine commission and still produce something unmistakably Sienese — long, elegant outlines, a gold ground stamped and tooled into the Virgin's mantle, and tender attendant angels.
Duccio's color is jewel-like, his line patient, and his Madonnas — solemn, tender, gently weighted — set the template that Sienese masters would inflect for the next century. He is the painter who made gold sing.
Bible scenes Duccio di Buoninsegna painted
John
Matthew
Luke
Mark
Isaiah
Ezekiel
Acts
Jeremiah
Revelation
Malachi
1 Peter
Proverbs
Hosea
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