Currently, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art is presenting an exhibition entitled, Sienna: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350. Mary K. and I had the opportunity to visit and wonder at this picture of transformation. Brought together for the first time, the work of three artists of Sienna, Italy, shows the moment when Western painting evolved to represent naturalistic detail. It happened in this place during a brief spell in the early 14th century.
The world had lost the knack for presenting the human form moving in space, as seen in the painting and sculpture of the time of the Roman empire. Figures were plain, kludgy, with haloed simplicity. Faces showed minimal expression. The currency of the time was piety. And the culture’s sensibilities for that piety limited the human expression. Yet, in Sienna, a few ambitious artists did something radical. They began to pay close attention to faces and gestures that display what life and ordinary people are like. And, they brought them into the same Biblical stories that supplied the content of art of the time. The change was stunning.
Visiting an art gallery or museum goes much better when you do it with an actual artist. A knowledgeable guide can show me the deep significance of things that seem meaningless to me. Suddenly I can enter in. For me, that guide is regularly my wife and, once again, she helped me see it.
On going into the exhibit, I was first struck by how all the pictures were about the New Testament. Here at the MET, in the heart of New York City in early 25th century, Jesus Christ is still being exalted. All the works commemorated some moment from His life or movement. I had the feeling that the scope of history is yet lifting up the Son of God. That did my heart well.
My guide was noticing the changes in the history of painting that were on display. What started it? What began the change that blossomed into the Renaissance? Mary K. stopped me and pointed to the first picture on display. She giggled at what she saw.
The artist, Duccio di Buoninsegna, painted a portrait of the Virgin Mary with the baby Jesus, known as The Stoclet Madonna. For hundreds of years, artists had been painting Mary and the baby Jesus. There was a certain way to do it. Traditionally, the two looked forward, very holy and serious. The right way to do it was to show their dignity. They were austere and flat. They were other-worldly. (Note the picture above.)
But Duccio did something different. The Baby is turned toward His mother. He is reaching up to grab her face. This is why Mary K. giggled. This, she remembered, is just what babies do to say, ‘hello’ to you. They reach out and grab your face. In fact, this is just what our granddaughter does when we pick her up: she grabs our face. Duccio had brought out Christ’s humanity.
In other words, what began the shape of modern Western painting, the great works of psychological depth that became the Western tradition, was a scene of what life is about: a mother with her baby, the concluding fruit of gender. Of course, this was The mother with The Baby. But those two, as Revelation 12 reminds us, provide a paradigm of the way that God works. Madonna and the man-child, who comes forth to slay the dragon.
Western painting began with the generative story of gender.