Lecture 8: Duccio and the

Maestà

Duccio and the Maestà .....................................................................

Lecture 8

Duccio is the ¿ rst great painter from Siena and the greatest painter from

Siena. He is usually played against his great Florentine contemporary,

Giotto, and usually, I think, to his disadvantage.

I

n this lecture, we consider the work of Duccio di Buoninsegna (1255/60–

1315/18), speci¿ cally his masterpiece, the Maestà. We compare Duccio

and his great contemporary, Giotto, in terms of their reputation and their

technique. We’ll also examine several panels from the Maestà, including the

large central altarpiece and scenes from the pinnacles and the predella.

Giotto, as a true and obvious precursor of the early-15th-century Florentine

Renaissance, is the bene¿ ciary of the modern era’s Darwinian belief in

progress—that the most important art is that which makes an obvious

advance on what came before. We should recognize this bias, because great

artists have always existed whose art was not in the forefront of “progress,”

however that might have been de¿ ned at the time.

Duccio is an artist clearly indebted to and reÀ ective of the artistic ideals of the

late Middle Ages, of the Gothic period in Italy, and of the Byzantine tradition,

which was well established in Italy. Instead of the powerful Naturalism of

Giotto, Duccio accepted the lyrical and austere beauty of Byzantine art and

imbued it with the spirit of the Humanism that was issuing from the newly

founded Franciscan and Dominican orders. However, each artist was aware

of the other’s work.

We know as little about the artistic origins of Duccio— his training or

apprenticeship—as we do about Giotto’s. Although Duccio was Sienese

and his style is often de¿ ned as Sienese, in contrast to Florentine, he was

sometimes commissioned by Florentine patrons. The Rucellai Madonna that

we looked at in Lecture Five was commissioned for the Florentine church

of Sta. Maria Novella. But because of the artistic rivalry between the two

cities in the 16th century, that painting long was attributed to a Florentine,

Cimabue. Duccio is regarded today with the same bias in most general