God’s Art

Few paintings demonstrate this as neatly and compellingly as Duccio di Buoninsegna’s Madonna and Child (ca. 1290–1300), which opens and anchors Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350 at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, on view through January 26, 2025. The gold-embossed poplar panel, probably produced for private devotion, is small—just 28 by 21 centimeters, including the frame. But there’s a lot going on within this “simple” portrait of Mary holding the infant Jesus. For starters, Duccio, a contemporary of Giotto and the leading painter in Siena at the turn of the fourteenth century, has included an illusionistic red-and-white parapet at the bottom of the image, conjuring a new spatial recess that draws the viewer out of their surroundings and more deeply into the separate “world” of the painting. Duccio pushes that movement one step further with yet another detail, this one borrowed from ivory statuettes then popular in France, which would have reached Siena because of its strategic location along the Via Francigena, the pilgrim path stretching from Canterbury to Rome. With his chubby right fist, the child playfully grasps the white inner folds of his mother’s veil, raising them like a theatrical curtain to reveal a still-more-intimate space under Mary’s hood. The Madonna’s head and face, wearing an enigmatic expression of melancholy and tenderness, have an almost sculptural weight and palpability. That’s just where Duccio wants the viewer to land: face to face with the Mother of God.