STENA'S BELIEVING

A new exhibition on Tuscan late medieval art provides a reassuring sense that even in the 14th century, there was a lot going on well outside the mainstream, writes Mark Hudson

- Mark Hudson

Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350

There’s a lot of gold in the National Gallery’s major winter exhibition. Not golden light or painted approximations of its effects, but the actual stuff: hammered gold leaf filling the haloes of saints, highlighting the folds in their garments, flooding the backgrounds of painting after painting in sheets of shining gilded glow. Well, what did you expect of medieval representations of the Saviour of the World and his Mother? Certainly not the rags and hovels that Jesus and his followers no doubt wore and lived in in real life. Dirty realism doesn’t appear in art for another 300 years.

The idea that spiritually powerful people are best embodied through the most valuable materials goes back at least to ancient Egypt, and permeated European art right up to the Renaissance, as anyone who has spent time in the National’s medieval galleries will be well aware. By and large, images of saints on gold backgrounds aren’t the most popular with the general public, as the curators of Siena: The Rise of Painting 1300-1350 observe in the catalogue.

The ostensible subject of the show is a late medieval protoRenaissance that took place in the Tuscan city a good century before the Florentine Renaissance – the one we all know about – and was centred on Duccio di Buoninsegna, considered the greatest of all Sienese painters. The innovations of Duccio and his contemporaries were pivotal, the show argues, in establishing painting as the dominant form in Western art. It also has the almost inevitable subtext of trying to make “gold ground” paintings more sympathetic and “relatable” to the modern viewer.