An Escape to Renaissance Siena

By ROBERT HUGHES

Sometimes very good wine gets kept until last. After a year in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art's public has submitted, once more, to being treated like two tons of anchovies in a cannery in return for a look at Degas, we have an exhibition of 15th century Sienese painting in the Met's Robert Lehman Wing, opening just in time for Christmas. "Painting in Renaissance Siena" is not only a delectable exhibition; there is also a chance that one might be able to see it, given the relative lack of interest in the 15th century. It is, in a way, a show for escapists -- for what could be more pleasant than to flee the brutish realities of modern life for the enameled, fictive grace and small harmonious scale of these predella fragments and miniatures by Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo and Girolamo da Cremona?

But it is also, in excelsis, a show about connoisseurship, not block- busting. It was scrupulously and intelligently put together by Keith Christiansen, curator of the museum's department of European paintings. His aim, as far as possible, was to concentrate on narrative painting -- stories from the Bible, mainly -- instead of the static images of the Madonna in which Sienese painting abounds. Because these narratives are usually found in the small scenes around compound altarpieces, they have been scattered from Budapest to Melbourne in what museums euphemistically call the "dispersal" -- the dismemberment by thieves and dealers -- of big church paintings.

At the Met, a number of these narratives have been reassembled for the first time this century, and they are a delight to see. The show is meant as a 75th birthday tribute to the redoubtable Sir John Pope-Hennessy, formerly chairman of the department of European painting at the Met and one of the great scholars of the Italian Renaissance. No doubt the Pope, as Hennessy is known, will be happy: when he was 23, he wrote his own book on the Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo.

Not since 1904 has there been a proper survey of Sienese Renaissance painting outside Siena. Not even the enthusiasms of Bernard Berenson and his heir Pope-Hennessy could give a Sienese artist like Sassetta the popularity of a Florentine like Botticelli. Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence was the locus classicus of Renaissance thought and art.

When the saber-toothed chieftains of American capitalism wanted models of political or cultural patronage, it was to Lorenzo de' Medici, prototype of city bosses, that they turned. Siena seemed less Promethean, less inventive. Its great moment in painting, by common consent, had come in the late 13th and 14th centuries, with the work of Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers. Then social and economic catastrophe struck in 1348, when the Black Death wiped out more than half its population. While it is true that Sienese painting and sculpture for the next 150 years did not have the extraordinary charge of radical invention that pervaded Florence, the idea of Sienese cultural decline after the great plague is a myth. On the whole, Sienese painting is gentler than Florentine, more graziosa, Gothic, conservative.

The Gothic-Byzantine heritage survived in Siena longer in the ornate altarpiece frames, the gold backgrounds, the exquisitely rhythmic and abstracted profiles. The natural world of woods, mountains, streams, sky and stars takes more time to become the frame of divine and biblical events, and, when it finally does, it is not the subject of botanical or geological curiosity. Trees are the ideas of trees; fruit and flowers are heraldic nature.

This emblematic world is at full intensity in the Met's own The Creation, and the Expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise by Giovanni di Paolo, circa 1445. God the Father hurtles down from heaven, supported by blue cherubim and bowling before him an immense wheel depicting the concentric divisions of the universe -- the earth, the spheres of water, air and fire, those of the seven planets, the zodiac and the dark blue primum mobile. On the right, an angel chivies our first parents -- pale, forked creatures -- out of a tapestry paradise of emblematic plants.

Yet a love of the real Tuscan landscape does shine through. The Osservanza Master's The Resurrection, in which Christ flies out of the sepulcher in a blaze of gold glory, watched by the prostrated Roman soldiers, is rendered magical by the red flush of early dawn that appears along the black profile of the hills. In a panel of another broken-up altarpiece, Saint Anthony rejects the temptations of a pile of gold the Devil put in his path. The gold, however, was for some reason scraped off and repainted as earth, so that the saint appears to be overreacting to the sight of a nearby rabbit.

So might a Sienese religious conservative have viewed the early 15th century's incursion of reality upon the Gothic-Byzantine, iconic tradition. The ragged gray-brown outcrops that appear in the background of Saint Anthony Tempted by a Heap of Gold are hardly the result of fantasy and are recognizably based on the gullies and crests of Le Crete, the bare hills southeast of Siena. And by the end of the quattrocento, in Benvenuto di Giovanni's image of Christ on his way to Calvary, the landscape is real and full of fantastical character: a Roman soldier like an armed Boschian lobster, tormentors pulling and grabbing at Christ, knots of rope, pebbles underfoot -- each bearing its own color and polish, like a cabochon stone.

The fierce empiricism of Masaccio, determined to fill real space with real figures that the senses could know, made its mark on some painters but not others. Perspective in 15th century Siena was something an artist could use as a scaffolding, modify or abandon altogether; Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni, active from 1423 to 1450) did this all the time. He studied earlier Sienese artists, mainly Pietro Lorenzetti, for spatial clues as carefully as Masaccio looked at Giotto, and inevitably, came up with a lighter, slightly flatter and, as it were, more spindly and papery space -- which he still imbued with a magical lightness and precision.

- This is seen in the six predella panels the Met has reunited from his early masterpiece: an altarpiece for the Wool Guild of Siena. The clarity and measure of the green architectural frame, with its slender columns and bladelike ribs, in which the theologian Saint Thomas Aquinas kneels in prayer, is like a visual gloss on his own syllogisms. An educated Sienese would have known that Aquinas had the habit of praying before he wrote. In another panel Sassetta showed Aquinas asking Christ what he thought of his book on the nature of the Eucharist, and receiving the approval of the Supreme Editor. The Sienese sophisticate would also have connected the well visible in the courtyard with the sacrament of baptism, and the cloister itself with the Earthly Paradise. For a modern viewer it is the exquisitely ordered space that counts, those intricacies of dull green, tan and gold, with the black blade of the saint's cappa sharply anchoring them.

The catalog essays by Christiansen and Carl Brandon Strehlke are a fine guide to the social background and doctrinal meaning of these religious comic strips. Packed with meaning, reasonable in size, this is the kind of show that the Met used to do superbly -- and now does not do often enough.