Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Giacobbe Giusti, AMBROGIO LORENZETTI
Ambrogio was one of the greatest European painters of the 14th century but, ironically enough, he is still a fairly little-known artist. A lot of people know him as the painter of « Good Government », a cycle of allegorical frescoes with astonishing views of the city and the countryside in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena’s town hall, but aside from that, they have absolutely no notion of the work of this uncontainably creative artist who profoundly renewed a host of iconographical traditions, not an inkling of the art of a man who renewed the very concept of the altarpiece as a genre, the great painter of religious stories, the narrator who looked beyond the bare bones of his narrative to rediscover the landscape and the view. With a considerable number of astutely targeted loans (including paintings from the Louvre, the National Gallery and the Gallerie degli Uffizi), the exhibition sets out to illustrate Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s intense artistic career by bringing a whole host of paintings together in Santa Maria della Scala, the majority of them originally produced either for Sienese citizens or for the city’s churches. A collection of surviving fragments will also allow visitors to « ideally » appreciate a number of fresco cycles which were extremely famous in their day but which have since been destroyed, for instance those in the chapter house and cloister of the convent of San Francesco in Siena or the paintings in Siena’s Augustinian chuch, and the cycle of frescoes (specially restored for the occasion) from the chapel of San Galgano on Montesiepi, which were so far removed from the consolidated religious iconography of the time that the chapel’s patrons demanded substantial changes to them shortly after their completion. The exhibition, preceded by an event entitled « Inside Restoration » funded with a contribution from the MIBACT, Italy’s Fine Arts Ministry, for Siena Cultural Capital 2015, also includes several other sites in the city such as the churches of San Francesco and Sant’Agostino, where Lorenzetti’s fresco cycles have been restored for the occasion, and of course the Palazzo Pubblico, the town hall with its superb cycle of frescoes depicting Good Government. The Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena is also currently devising a series of collateral events and planning to devote a number of rooms to paintings and other works by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s contemporaries, while the Archivio di Stato is planning a documentary section devoted to, or built around, the figure of Ambrogio Lorenzetti himself. The exhibition will include an audio-guide in five languages and a selection of videos containing both information and narrative.
Masterpieces by Ambrogio Lorenzetti exhibited in Massa Marittima
11 works by the Sienese painter, including the 1335 Maestà, are on display from June 2 until September 16 in the Museo di San Pietro all’Orto
Eleven works by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, one of the major European painters of the 14th century, are on display from June 2 until September 16 in the Museo di San Pietro all’Orto in Massa Marittima in the exhibition “Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Maremma: masterpieces from the Grosseto and Siena territories.” The exhibition is a fitting continuation of the works on display at Santa Maria della Scala in Siena, but it is above all a tribute to the city of Massa Marittima, which is home to one of the 14th century painter’s greatest masterworks, the Maestà, carried out around 1335 for the Augustinian hermits of the church of San Pietro all’Orto, the origins of the current museum’s name. In this painting, Lorenzetti developed a complex iconography that depicts the three theological virtues seated on the steps that lead up to the Madonna’s throne. This painting is the starting point for the exhibition, which provides the chance to view works from different seasons of the painter’s career all together. It is also a chance to better contextualize the Maestà in the setting of what was considered the Sienese Maremma, with works from the church of San Galgano in Montesiepi, from Roccalbegna, Montenero d’Orcia and Siena. Among the works on display is the figure of King Solomon (1320/1325), a fragment that originally was part of one of the frames connecting the scenes that Ambrogio, together with his brother Pietro, carried out for the chapter room of the Sienese convent of San Francesco. The Polyptych of Saint Peter in Castelvecchio and the Polyptych of the Maddona Enthroned with Saints Peter and Paul painted for the Church of Roccalbegna both date back to 1340. Between these two dates were a host of other works including the Cross painted for the Parish Church of Montenero d’Orcia; the glass window depicting Saint Michael the Archangel triumphant over a demon; the sinopia works of the Annunciation for the Chapel of San Galgano in Montesiepi; the Four Saints of the Museo dell’Opera della Metropolitana di Siena; the frescoed scenes along the eastern side of the cloister of San Francesco, also in Siena; and the Allegory of the Redemption for the Pinacoteca of Siena.
Giacobbe Giusti 