Duccio di Buoninsegna

Italian painter

• Born: c. 1255
• Birthplace: Possibly Siena (now in Italy)
• Died: August 3, 1319
• Place of death: Siena (now in Italy)

By blending techniques borrowed from French Gothic, Florentine, and Byzantine art, Duccio created a distinct Sienese style of painting. His attempts at three-dimensionality and his inventive use of architectural structures in his painting influenced future generations of Italian and French artists.

Early Life

The importance of the work of Duccio di Buoninsegna (DEWT-choh dee bwah-neen-SAYN-yah) is often overshadowed in art criticism by the exuberant praise of the work of his contemporary, Giotto, even though many of the works attributed to the latter may not have actually been done by him. Another handicap in the assessment of Duccio’s work stems from the fact that he was born in Siena and not Florence, the center of Italian art in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. According to the art historian John White:

It is hard to think of any major painter who, when it comes to generalizations about his art, is less appreciated for himself, and on his own terms, and who is more consistently considered in a framework of relative and qualitative comparisons than Duccio.

Of his personal life, little of substance is known. He was married to a woman named Taviana, with whom he had six sons and one daughter. Three of his sons later became painters themselves, yet nothing is known of their lives or work. Duccio’s everyday life was apparently filled with numerous confrontations with the rigid stratification of Sienese society. A large number of recorded fines against the young artist have suggested a bohemian lifestyle to some; yet most of the infractions were petty in nature, such as breaking of curfew, failing to attend a public meeting to which he was summoned, and refusing to swear allegiance to a superior. Perhaps Duccio was as independently oriented toward his civic duties as he was toward his art.

Between 1295 and 1302, the artist undertook a series of trips, first to Paris and then to Rome. In Paris, he worked as a miniaturist, or manuscript illuminator. On seeing Chartres Cathedral, located a short distance from the capital city, Duccio succumbed to the spell of French Gothic art . His visit to Chartres profoundly affected his later work, particularly the Rucellai Madonna, the only true Gothic painting of the thirteenth century in Italy, which borrows directly from the famous cathedral window “La Belle Verrière.” Most experts agree that the artist also traveled to Constantinople about this same time, for few can believe that the Byzantine influences so visible in Duccio’s major work could have been acquired at second hand.

By the beginning of the fourteenth century, Duccio had become the head of his own large workshop, which may have included as many as twelve assistants. Although his later life would be spent in constant and profitable work that ultimately permitted him to purchase a small vineyard, not far from Siena, his children renounced his will, for it contained nothing but debts.

Life’s Work

Perhaps as many as nine or ten of Duccio’s paintings survive; nevertheless, his reputation hinges on three principal works: the Crevole Madonna (1280), the Rucellai Madonna (1285), and his masterwork, the climax of his career, the Maestà (1308-1311), a representation of the lives of the Madonna and Christ child, created for the Duomo of Siena.

The Crevole Madonna clearly shows its Byzantine origins, most notably, in the subtle color alterations of the Madonna’s drapery, which range from a gentle pink to dark vermilion, the flowing golden hemline, the soft cream-white tunic of the Christ child, and the crystal blues of the cloaked angels in the corners. The figures themselves reflect the artist’s concern for a new humanization of the Holy Mother and Child. The babe is gently extending his right hand to touch the headdress of the Madonna, yet he does not actually touch her face, suggesting both closeness and separation, reminding the viewer of both Christ’s Passion and the Holy Mother’s intuition of its nature. Despite the charming proportions of Christ’s figure, to the modern eye, the infant resembles more a miniature of the adult Christ than an infant.

Even though the work lacks a true three-dimensional character, the chubby, cherublike representation of the child represents one of the earliest attempts at three-dimensionality in painting. Many of the innovations that characterize Duccio’s mature work and set him apart from his contemporaries are in evidence here: the close attention to detail, the transparency of the draperies that distinctly reveal the figure of the child, and the precision of the facial tones and lines.

Duccio’s second extant masterpiece is the Rucellai Madonna, commissioned in Florence on April 15, 1285, for the Chapel of the Laudesi. Signed “Duccio di Buoninsegna, the painter, of Siena,” it is a majestic work, measuring 15 feet (4.6 meters) high by 10 feet (3 meters) wide. For several centuries, the work was attributed to the Florentine painter Cimabue, but most twentieth century critics agree that it was done entirely by the hand of Duccio. The work presents the immaculate Virgin Mary and the Christ child surrounded by six angels. An exquisitely feminine Mary, seated on a massive, ornately carved throne done in Byzantine fashion, cradles the child on her left arm. Of particular interest, both historical and aesthetic, is the complex pose of the child, his right arm extending across and away from the Madonna, his legs slightly crooked to convey a comfortable, childlike position of safety on his mother’s knees. Of further importance is the absence of eye contact between mother and child, a symbolic foreshadowing of the tragic separation of Christ from the world after the Passion.

Duccio’s Gothic heritage is again much apparent in this work. The soft, undulating folds of the Madonna’s drapery model the angle of the legs beneath, so that, despite the relative absence of three-dimensional perspective, the position of the limbs beneath the garments is clearly indicated. A gilded hem serpentines across the front of her garment, accentuating the Gothic curves and cascades of material. The six angels, three on either side of the principal figures, seem to be floating in golden air, accentuating their celestial mission; Mary is obviously enthroned in Heaven, not on Earth.

The depiction of the heavenly throne on which Mary is seated reveals the innovation that Duccio was attempting. With consummate finesse, Duccio emphasizes the structural supports of the throne to create a feeling of its massive weight and stability. On observing the celestial throne, one critic noted that Duccio’s technique lay “far outside the imaginative range or the executive ability of any of his contemporaries.”

Despite the genius of these two early works, it is the Maestà, created for the high altar of the chapel of the Duomo of Siena, which has assured Duccio his place among the ranks of such masters as Giotto and Cimabue. The work has an interesting history. On the day that it was carried to the cathedral, June 9, 1311, there was a spectacular procession, as reported by one anonymous chronicler of the time:

On the day on which it was carried to the Duomo, the shops were locked up and the Bishop ordered a great and devout company of priests and brothers with a solemn procession accompanied by the Signori of the Nine and all the officials of the Commune, and all the populace, and all the most worthy were in order next to the said panel with lights lit in their hands; and then behind were the women and children with much devotion; and they accompanied it right to the Duomo.

The work had taken two years and eight months to complete. The prestigious nature of this commission for Duccio is revealed by the fact that the Maestà was to replace a revered Sienese icon.

In 1771, the Maestà was sawed into seven pieces and disassembled to make room for a new altarpiece. Although much of the work was returned to the cathedral in 1776, many of the panels have since been scattered to various museums. In the late nineteenth century the major parts of the work were moved from the cathedral to the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Siena, where they have remained since.

In its original state, the Maestà consisted of one large, two-sided altarpiece. Duccio himself painted only the front panels; the back panels were executed by the numerous apprentices in his workshop. Forty-six panels from the original fifty-four or fifty-eight are extant. Majestic and complex, the work originally stood on a base with seven scenes from the early life of Christ, beginning with the “Annunciation” and ending with the “Teaching in the Temple.” The main frontal panel, an expansive paean to the Virgin, centers on the scene of “Virgin Enthroned with Angels and Saints.” Above the principal panels are half portraits of those ten apostles not represented in the central panels. Two central panels are missing from the original but were probably the “Assumption” and the “Coronation of the Virgin.” These predella, independent yet thematically related panels arranged in chronological order, are the earliest extant examples of this technique in Italian art.

On the back are twenty-six scenes from the Passion. The series follows an imaginative order unique to Duccio’s work, beginning from the bottom left with the “Entry into Jerusalem” and ending at the top right with the “Apparition on the Road to Emmaus.” Six panels at the top complete the sequence. The central panels of the work represent the “Agony in the Garden,” “The Betrayal,” and “The Crucifixion.” Two panels from the main central column are missing but were probably “The Ascension” and “Christ in Majesty.”

A masterpiece of painting, architectural construction, and engineering, the Maestà required a precision of measurement and awareness of perspective generally unheard of at the time. The overall compositional effectiveness of the work eschews monumentality in favor of an elegant grandeur and scrupulously sustains the symbolic relationships of the various parts to the whole. The entire effect dramatically testifies to the genius of the artist.

Duccio’s attention to iconographic and realistic detail, his flawless sense of harmony and unity within complexity, and his surety of line and color combine in the Maestà to produce a work of incomparable proportion and beauty. The narrative character of the work is typical of the period in which Duccio was working, yet here again he left his particular imprint. Rather than having the panels relate the story of Christ’s life in the traditional, linear fashion, Duccio selected a sort of zigzag pattern to suggest the simultaneity of actions and events in time, as they might actually have occurred.

Significance

Duccio’s recognizable Tuscan style emerged out of subtle blending of the Byzantine mosaic style with French Gothic, Roman, and Florentine influences. In addition to his experimentations with proportion and perspective, and with color, shadings, and line, Duccio introduced several startling compositional innovations into his work. In one of the most famous panels of the Maestà, “The Healing of the Man Born Blind,” Duccio produced the first surviving example of a cityscape that actually encloses the figures in the foreground. The buildings on the right side of the work, encircling the blind man, seem to lunge forward to frame the work. Although by modern standards these structures still appear flat and disproportionate, and the figures still appear to be pasted over the background, a sense of an enclosed space is dramatically present.

Duccio’s attempts to represent coherently the perspective of background structures can also be seen in the panel “Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin,” in which the two figures are completely enclosed by an architectural space. Never before had an artist so clearly suggested the three-dimensionality of space on a flat canvas. Always in the past, architectural space had appeared behind the figures. Such experimental techniques greatly hastened the movement of Italian art toward the new kind of realism of the Renaissance.

Although Duccio’s direct influence on later generations of Italian artists pales in comparison to that of Giotto, his influence on artists outside Italy, and particularly in France, was significant. In the work of Jean Pucelle, for example, whose Parisian illumination workshop was the most famous in Europe between 1320 and 1350, Duccio’s influence is explicitly present. In a well-known Book of Hours, a sort of private prayer book, for Jeanne, queen of France, the “Annunciation” illumination borrows both its composition and its general conception of interior space from the panel of the same name in the Maestà. Among the later Italian artists who continued to model on Duccio’s work, only one disciple, Simone Martini, achieved any distinction. Although he abandoned Duccio’s lyrical style, Martini continued to develop many of the master’s techniques.

Bibliography

Bellosi, Luciano. Duccio, the Maestà. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Covers the art of Duccio, in particular the Maestà. Bellosi examines the parts of the work, including the Virgin and Child on the main front panel, scenes from the Passion of Christ on the main back panel, scenes from Christ’s infancy and his ministry, and apparitions of Christ after the Resurrection. Bibliography and index.

Janella, Cecilia. Duccio di Buoninsegna. New York: Riverside, 1991. A biography of the painter Duccio that examines his life and works. Contains color illustrations and bibliography.

Satkowski, Jane. Duccio di Buoninsegna: The Documents and Early Sources. Athens, Ga.: Georgia Museum of Art, 2000. An examination of the early writings on Duccio and of his times. Illustrated. Bibliography and index.

Stubblebine, James H. Duccio di Buoninsegna and His School. 2 vols. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979. Provides a complete and reasoned analysis of Duccio’s work, major and minor, and a detailed study of the author’s life. Stubblebine meticulously documents the location, size, attribution, condition, and provenance of each of the artist’s works, providing a critical evaluation of each. In all cases, the author presents a balanced view of the problems of influences on Duccio’s work and on the debates concerning attribution.

Weber, Andrea. Duccio di Buoninsegna: About 1255-1319. Koln, Germany: Könemann, 1997. Part of the Masters of Italian Art series, this work examines the life and paintings of Duccio. Contains color illustrations and a bibliography.