The Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries
In spite of the momentous developments, the path towards the Renaissance was not to follow a continuous or consistent course. Indeed, the leading local school of painters in the fourteenth century was not that of Florence, but of neighbouring Siena , which had very different preoccupations. This had a great deal to do with the father figure, Duccio di Buoninsegna (c1255-1318), who did not go along the revolutionary path of Giotto, but instead breathed a whole new life into the Byzantine tradition. Duccio's sense of grandeur is well conveyed by the central panel of his masterpiece, the Maesta, in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo of his native city. However, it is the small scenes of this vast altarpiece which bring out his best quality: that of a masterful storyteller, adept at arrangement, grouping and the depiction of expression, feeling and movement. Colour, which in Giotto is merely used to bring out the forms, becomes a leading component in its own right. In spite of the presence in the city of the vibrant statues of Giovanni Pisano, subsequent Sienese painters found Duccio's narrative art the more potent model. Simone Martini (c1284-1344) began his career by painting a fresco counterpart of Duccio's Maesta in the Palazzo Pubblico, though his most celebrated work in this building, the commemorative Equestrian Portrait of Guidoriccio da Fogliano , is now widely regarded as a fake. His refined, graceful style depended above all on line, colour and decorative effects - seen to best effect in the cycle of The Life of St Martin in the lower church in Assisi and in the sumptuous, cunningly designed Annunciation in the Uffizi. The latter was painted in collaboration with his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi (d1357), who independently painted the Maesta in the Palazzo Pubblico in San Gimignano, and may also have been responsible for the dramatic New Testament frescoes in the Collegiata of the same town, traditionally ascribed to the otherwise unknown Barna . Another Sienese painter who worked at Assisi was Pietro Lorenzetti (active 1306-45); his frescoes there show the impact of Giotto, and have a sense of pathos which is uncharacteristic of Sienese painting. His brother Ambrogio Lorenzetti (active 1319-47) was a more original artist, whose main achievement was the idiosyncratic Allegory of Good and Bad Government in the Palazzo Pubblico, which shows painting being used for a secular, didactic purpose for the first time and raises the landscape background to a new, higher status, with an awareness of perspective uncommon for this date. The other notable Sienese sculptor of the period was the mysterious Lorenzo Maitani (c1270-1330), who is associated with one work only - the wonderfully lyrical reliefs on the most sumptuous facade in Italy, that of the duomo in Orvieto. In Florence , meanwhile, a whole group of painters consciously followed Giotto's style, without materially adding to it. The most talented was Maso di Banco (active 1320-1350), who was particularly skilled at conveying the master's sense of plastic form, while the most faithful was Taddeo Gaddi (d1366), whose son Agnolo Gaddi (d1396) carried the Giottesque tradition on to nearly the end of the century. Bernardo Daddi (c1290-1349), on the other hand, combined this tradition with aspects of the Sienese style. The sculptor Andrea Pisano (c1290-1348) succeeded Giotto as master mason of the campanile. The reliefs he executed for it, plus the bronze door he made for the baptistry, translate Giotto's pictorial language back into a three-dimensional format. A reaction against the hegemony of the Giottesque style came with Andrea Orcagna (c1308-68) who was equally prominent as a painter and sculptor, developing a flowery, decorative idiom seen to best effect in the tabernacle in Orsanmichele. The paintings of Orcagna and his school re-established the hierarchical tradition of the Byzantines, and rejected the importance of spatial depth. At the very end of the fourteenth century, the International Gothic style, originating in the Burgundian courts, swept across Europe. This introduced a new richness to the depiction of landscape, animals and costume, though it was unconcerned with intellectual matters. Its dissemination in Italy was largely due to Gentile da Fabriano (c1370-1427), whose Adoration of the Magi in the Uffizi (one of his relatively few surviving compositions) shows the gorgeously opulent surface effects of this style at its best. Another leading practitioner was Masolino da Panicale (c1383-1447), who is best known for having begun the famous fresco cycle in Santa Maria del Carmine in Florence. In the same city, the new movement influenced Lorenzo Monaco (c1372-1425), whose work bridges the Florentine and Sienese traditions. International Gothic took a particularly firm grip in Verona, chiefly through Antonio Pisanello (1395-1455). The latter's fame rests partly on his prowess as a medallist, and only a tantalizing handful of his paintings remain, notably the frescoes in the Veronese churches of Sant'Anastasia and San Fermo, and the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua, which magically evoke the idealized courtly world of fairy tales. Numerous drawings prove these were based on patient observations of nature - something that was to be a key element in the unfolding of the Renaissance.
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