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At the Institute there are several rooms hung with early productions of the Sienese school, painted before the invention of oil-colors, on wood shaped into Gothic altar-pieces. The backgrounds still retain a bedimmed splendor of gilding. There is a plentiful use of red, and I can conceive that the pictures must have shed an illumination through the churches where they were displayed.
On the ascent, at intervals, the eye is fascinated by prospects to the north and east over Val di Chiana, Cortona, Thrasymene, Chiusi; to south and west over Monte Cetona, Radicofani, Monte Amiata, the Val d'Ombrone, and the Sienese Contado.
They meet a citto that is a bambino in Sienese dialect who proves to be none other than Cupid himself, and rewards them according to their deserts, Euridice obtaining the love of the courtly shepherd Orindio, while Diversa is condemned to follow the rude and loveless Fantasia. The piece is written in a mixture of ottava and terza rima, with a variety of lyrics introduced.
Sebastian suggests altogether another kind of art, a sensuous and sometimes an almost hysterical sort of ecstasy, as in the Swooning Virgin or the Swoon of St. Catherine at Siena, that we find Sienese painting again. Influenced in the beginning by the Sienese, the Umbrian school of painting remained almost entirely religious.
After leaving the gateway, with its massive fortifications and frescoed arches, the road passes into a dull earthy country, very much like some parts and not the best parts of England. The beauty of the Sienese contado is clearly on the sandstone, not upon the clay. Hedges, haystacks, isolated farms all were English in their details.
It is true, I admired the Sienese very much," he added, turning toward Dorsenne. "I spent three months in copying the Simone Martini of the municipality, the Guido Riccio, who rides between two strongholds on a gray heath, where there is not a sign of a tree or a house, but only lances and towers. Do I remember Lorenzetti?
To be the rallying point of a very cosmopolitan, literary, but by no means unworldly society, seems suddenly to have become Mme. d'Albany's mission; and reading the letters copied from the Montpellier Archives, and published by M. Saint René Taillandier, one wonders how this friend of Mme. de Staël, of Sismondi, of Mme. de Souza, this hostess of Moore, of Lamartine, of Lady Morgan, of every sort of French, English, German, Russian, or polyglot creature of distinction that travelled through Italy in the early part of this century, could ever have been the beloved of Alfieri, the misanthropic correspondent of a lot of Sienese professors, priests, and shop-keepers.
The Sienese announced, in 1477, the alliance between Ferrante and Sixtus IV, with which they themselves were associated, by driving a chariot round the city, with 'one clad as the goddess of peace standing on a hauberk and other arms. At the Venetian festivals the processions, not on land but on water, were marvelous in their fantastic splendor.
After the days of Duccio and Simone Martini, of Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti, were over, there remained but little for the Sienese to do in painting. Taddeo di Bartolo continued the tradition of Duccio as the later Giottesques continued that of Giotto. His most remarkable wall-painting is a fresco of the Apostles visiting the Virgin, the motive of which is marked by great originality.
There is a very curious and much more ancient Madonna of this class preserved at Siena, and styled the "Madonna del Voto." The Sienese being at war with Florence, placed their city under the protection of the Virgin, and made a solemn vow that, if victorious, they would make over their whole territory to her as a perpetual possession, and hold it from her as her loyal vassals.
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