March 8, 2025
Siena Reborn: The National Gallery Reunites a Lost Golden Age
'Siena: The Rise of Painting' reassembled masterpieces scattered for centuries, making the case that the Renaissance owes as much to Siena as to Florence.
Florence usually hogs the Renaissance limelight, but the National Gallery's 2025 exhibition 'Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350' argued for a different cradle. In the decades before the plague struck around 1350, Siena was a furnace of innovation.
Built with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and bringing together more than 100 works, the show reunited panels from Duccio's monumental double-sided 'Maestà' altarpiece — scattered around the world for centuries — and Simone Martini's glittering Orsini polyptych, together for the first time in living memory.
Through Duccio, Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers, it revealed the moment painting learned to tell stories with new tenderness, depth and drama — the seedbed of everything that followed.
Image: “Maest 0 duccio 1308-11 siena duomo” — Duccio di Buoninsegna, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.