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What gives peculiar value to this elaborate work of Sienese art is, that in it Duccio managed to combine the tradition of an early hieratic style of painting with all the charm of brilliant colouring and with dramatic force of presentation only rivalled at that time by Giotto.

He crossed the room, and took the Sienese chalice between his hands, holding it gingerly for a moment as if it had been some unclean thing; then he dashed it on to the marble floor and it lay in splinters about his feet. "My dear sir," said Leslie tranquilly, "don't be melodramatic. And don't give the servants so much trouble and possible injury when they do the room to-morrow.

However reluctant we may be to find Vasari, that divine gossip, at fault, it might seem that Cimabue's Triumph is a fable, or if, indeed, it happened, was stolen, for the Rucellai Madonna is apparently the work of Duccio the Sienese.

The work has a decidedly Sienese character; but recent critics are inclined to assign it to a certain Andrea, of Florence. See Crowe and Cavalcaselle, vol. ii. p. 89.

On inquiry, however, he found that the message had been sent, and that the paper had been put into the Signore's own hand by the Sienese messenger. Then he got into some discourse with the landlord about the strange gentleman at Casalunga. Trevelyan was beginning to become the subject of gossip in the town, and people were saying that the stranger was very strange indeed.

"I gazed, and gazing, wept the bitterness of fate." The prevailing note of Siena and the Sienese seems, as I have said, to be a soft and tranquil grace; yet this people had one of the stormiest and maddest of Italian histories. They were passionate in love and hate, vehement in their popular amusements, almost frantic in their political conduct of affairs.

The road was thronged with country people, mostly women and children, who had been spending the feast-day in Siena; and parties of boys were chasing one another through the fields, pretty much as boys do in New England of a Sunday, but the Sienese lads had not the sense of Sabbath-breaking like our boys. Sunday with these people is like any other feast-day, and consecrated cheerful enjoyment.

It is still circled with the wall and gates built by the Sienese in 1366, and is a fair specimen of an intact mediæval stronghold. Here we leave the main road, and break into a country-track across a bed of sandstone, with the delicate volcanic lines of Monte Amiata in front, and the aërial pile of Montalcino to our right.

But some weeks ago, among the pile of the Countess's letters to Sienese friends preserved by Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri at Siena, I had the good fortune to discover what are virtually five love-letters of hers, obviously intended for Alfieri although addressed to his friend Francesco Gori.

Not a bit of it thereupon boldly say I; the Florentines may rest on their laurels and the lounger on his lounge. The early painters of the two groups have indeed much in common; but the Florentines had the good fortune to see their efforts gathered up and applied by a few pre-eminent spirits, such as never came to the rescue of the groping Sienese.