Search form

menu menu
  • Daily & Weekly newsletters
  • Buy & download The Bulletin
  • Comment on our articles

Italian art brings saints to life at Bozar

17:15 23/09/2014

Should this promising Indian summer not be in it for the long haul, Brussels is offering a multifaceted Italian autumn, the highlight of which is an exhibition featuring the finest art from Italy’s city states in the middle ages.

Until November, film archive Cinematek is the place to indulge yourself in the masterpieces of Luchino Visconti, whose retrospective includes a restored version of the 1962 classic Il gattopardo (The Leopard), presented by icon of Italian cinema Claudia Cardinale (on 6 October).

If you prefer your saints somewhat less flamboyant, the exhibition Paintings from Siena: Ars Narrandi in Europe’s Gothic Age at Bozar might suit you better. The exhibition shows some 60 highly fragile works of the Sienese School from the 13th to the 15th century, a time when the Tuscan city was a hub for pilgrims and traders travelling between northwestern Europe and eastern centres of culture and commerce, like Rome, Constantinople and the Holy City, Jerusalem.

It would take until well into the 19th century for Italy to become one nation. For centuries, there was fierce competition marked by shifting alliances between rival city republics, such as Siena and nearby Florence.

The rich and powerful, whether secular or religious, often chose arts and crafts to help them articulate their influence and spread their beliefs.

The artists they engaged were versatile craftsmen, who worked in the slipstream of the ruling classes, their patrons. Only later, during the Renaissance and especially the Romantic era, did the rather modern myth of the artist as a highly individual creator expressing his innermost thoughts and feelings gain prominence.

Solemn silence
The late middle age artists shown at Bozar were called upon to design, embellish and construct various items that could be used in their patrons’ daily lives, or could serve for special occasions. The better part of the artworks in Paintings from Siena – mainly on loan from the Pinacoteca Nazionale di Siena – are (parts of) foldable diptychs or triptychs meant to be carried along during pilgrimages or to practise devotion at home.

The wooden panels are painted with the tempera technique, which predates oil painting and consists of powdered pigments dissolved in water with egg yolk or other glutinous materials.

In the same corridors and spacious rooms that welcomed a record number of visitors during the summer expo dedicated to Flemish painter Michaël Borremans, there now reigns a solemn silence. Dim lighting and large black or white walls create a sober atmosphere.

Every section of the thematically organised exhibition opens with an introductory text that sketches the historical context. The Sienese artworks recount an evolution from depictions that remain faithful to the iconography of religious figures, gradually leading to the introduction of narrative elements and references to contemporary life.

Striking evolution
Fittingly, Paintings from Siena starts off with glorifications of the Virgin Mary, Siena’s patron saint. In “Madonna and Child with two Angels” (1262) by Dietisalvi di Speme, Christ sits on Mary’s arm but mother and son barely seem to touch each other. Mary gazes distantly to us viewers against a golden background, typical for gothic art.

Half a century later, Simone Martini paints “Mother with Child” (1300-1310) in which the right hands of Mary and her son are tenderly entangled, even if both stare in opposite directions.

In Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s “Mary with Child” (1340), the infant Jesus has his arm around his mother’s neck in a gentle embrace. In less than a century, the blank holy figures seem to have become an actual mother and son.

Another tempera on wood panel, Giovanni di Paolo’s “Madonna of Humility” (1450, pictured above), also shows Mary holding her son close, against a strikingly different background in comparison with the earlier works. The Virgin Mary is surrounded by a flower garden, and behind her we see houses, fields and mountains. The halos around their heads still radiate with gold, but the gilded backdrop – often with gold leaf – has been replaced by a landscape.

Reliance on themes
This evolution towards a more mundane yet still highly sacrosanct art is reflected not just in the depiction of various scenes from the lives of Mary and Jesus. There’s also a shift towards portraits of saints, including contemporaries such as Saint Francis of Assisi (1181-1226) and Saint Catherine of Siena (1347-1380).

Paintings from Siena shows how artists vary on visual and narrative themes. You can see how pieces of cloth or blood-soaked patches are introduced and subsequently transformed. Over time, the Siena art becomes more dramatic – recounting the crucifixion and resurrection or other Biblical passages – and incorporates more details.

One remarkable example in that respect is Giovanni di Paolo’s “Last Judgment, Heaven and Hell” (1460-1465), a work that is clearly influenced by Dante’s epic poem Divine Comedy, which he illuminated.

Near the end of the exhibition, the Italian Renaissance is in full swing. Sitting alongside The Yellow Side of Sociality, an exhibition of present-day Italian art, in which the gothic gold finds echoes in fluorescent yellow, Paintings from Siena looks ahead with great self-confidence.

Florentine middle age poets Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio would prove to be the fathers of Italian language. Nowadays, the historic centre of Siena is recognised by Unesco as world heritage, just like its (former) rival Florence.

St Francis and St Catherine are partners as patrons of Italy, and the latter was named one of the six patron saints of Europe in 1999, the year the monetary union was established.

Paintings from Siena is a remarkable congregation of extremely delicate art – its voyage to the capital of Europe is not an obvious one. Organised for the Italian presidency of the European Union, artists from the Sienese School are once more employed to distribute the core values of their benefactors. Paintings from Siena celebrates a founding base of (European) humanism and salutes the city, the country, and the EU that embed it.

Until 18 January, Bozar, Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussels

Photo: A detail from Giovanni di Paolo’s “Madonna of Humility”, circa 1450

©Pinacoteca Nazionale

Written by Bjorn Gabriels