Identifier: italiancities01blas (find matches)
Title: Italian cities
Year: 1903 (1900s)
Authors: Blashfield, Edwin Howland, 1848-1936 Blashfield, Evangeline Wilbour, d. 1918
Subjects: Art -- Italy Cities and towns -- Italy Italy -- Description and travel
Publisher: New York : Scribner's
Contributing Library: University of California Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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a. She had spurned antique beauty,and although two great sculptors, Jacopo dellaQuercia and Vecchietta, called Siena home, they hadno influence apparently on her painters. Nor didthese painters study Nature, for their environmentacted upon them in a yet more direct and practicalway. What the pious and unlettered Sienese re-quired of them were images of devotion, not objectsof art, something to pray to, not to criticise, a visionof Paradise, not a glimpse of every-day life. From the collection of altar-pieces in the gallery,we can form a very clear idea of how the painterssupplied this want. The triptych was a favorite form, a Maestii, orMajesty (^. e. a Madonna and child sitting in statesurrounded by saints and angels) the most popularsubject. The Virgin, as befitted the sovereign ofSiena, is always represented as an aristocrat, a po-tentate, a feudal princess. The Coronation andAssumption are painted again and again, but we 96 SIENA INSTITUTE OF FINE ARTS BENVENUTO DI GIOVANNI ANCONA
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SIENA look in vain for a Nativity, an Adoration of theShepherds, or of the Magi, subjects dear to theUmbrian and Florentine schools. To the Sienese the golden background wasalways inseparable from a devotional picture,wrote Eio in his Art Chretien adding, thismust not be attributed to the narrowness of theirviews, but to the extreme orthodoxy of their taste.The background then behind the Queen of Heavenis of dazzling, unshaded gold, wonderful intricatepatternings wander over the jewelled robes, realgems shine in the rich fret of gold on Madonnashead, the Saints are gorgeous in surcoats embroid-ered like a mead, and the peacock-winged angelsare no whit less fine. The Sienese had given theByzantine Madonna life ; the naturalistic Florentinesmade her human. They took the diadem from herbrows ; they despoiled her of her regal robes ; theybade her rise and walk. In their hands, the be-jewelled patrician became a proud young mother;the divine Child, the little jointed puppet who satstiffly

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