Duccio's Madonna and Child

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Madonna and Child, ca. 1300. Duccio di Buoninsegna (Italian, Sienese, active by 1278, died 1318). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Purchase, Rogers Fund, Walter and Leonore Annenberg and The Annenberg Foundation Gift, Lila Acheson Wallace Gift, Annette de la Renta Gift, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, Louis V. Bell, and Dodge Funds, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, several members of The Chairman's Council Gifts, Elaine L. Rosenberg and Stephenson Family Foundation Gifts, 2003 Benefit Fund, and other gifts and funds from various donors, 2004 (2004.442). More About This Exhibition In what has been described by Philippe de Montebello, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as "one of the great single acquisitions of the last half century," the Museum announces the purchase of a rare and uniquely important early Renaissance masterpiece by the fourteenth-century Italian painter Duccio di Buoninsegna (act. by 1278, d. 1318). The painting, in tempera and gold on wood, shows the Madonna and Child behind a parapet. The work—the last known Duccio still in private hands—was known as the Stroganoff Madonna, after its first recorded owner, Count Grigorii Stroganoff, who died in Rome in 1910. "Like our glorious diptych of the Crucifixion and Last Judgment by Jan van Eyck, or our Saint Jerome by Botticelli, this marvelous painting, small in size but immense in achievement and influence, will become one of the signature works at the Metropolitan Museum," said Mr. de Montebello. "Filling a gap in our Renaissance collection that even the Metropolitan had scant hopes of ever closing, the addition of the Duccio will enable visitors for the first time to follow the entire trajectory of European painting from its beginnings to the present. Moreover, the Duccio Madonna and Child is a work of sublime beauty. This was a unique opportunity not only to add a masterpiece to the Museum’s holdings but to give its collections a new dimension." A Rare and Important Acquisition Duccio’s Influence on the History of Art Exhibition Text Panel About Duccio’s Madonna and Child Exhibition Text Panel About Duccio Timeline of Art History The Met Store

A Rare and Important Acquisition
Together with Giotto, Duccio is considered one of the two principal founders of Western European painting. His works are of extreme rarity: only a dozen or so are known, including his famous altarpiece, the Maestà in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Siena. In fact, most of the paintings by this artist in non-Italian museums are fragments from this great and complex altarpiece, which once included almost sixty individual narrative scenes (it was cut apart in the eighteenth century and parts of it dispersed). The Metropolitan’s new acquisition, however, is a complete and independent work, not a fragment of a larger one.

To purchase the painting, the Metropolitan Museum has committed a substantial portion of long-held funding earmarked for acquisitions, to be supplemented by targeted fundraising, for the purchase of this work. Mr. de Montebello noted that the funding tapped for the purchase will not draw on funds raised and specifically set aside for either Museum operations or capital construction and maintenance.

Though well known to specialists from photographs, the Duccio work had not been seen publicly in more than two generations. At the monographic exhibition on the artist held in Siena last year, it was reproduced in color for the very first time, but the original was not lent. Rumors that it might enter the market began to circulate more than a year ago, but only in the last six months did its owners decide to sell the picture. Its acquisition by the Metropolitan brings into the public domain the last remaining available work by one of the giants of European art.

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Duccio’s Influence on the History of Art
Painted about 1300, the Metropolitan Madonna is the opening page of the most glorious chapter of Duccio’s art, culminating in his great Maestà altarpiece (1308–11), a milestone of Western art that is comparable only to Giotto’s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua.

Commenting on Duccio’s achievement, Keith Christiansen, the Jayne Wrightsman Curator of European Paintings at the Metropolitan, remarked: "In certain respects, we might say that Duccio was to Giotto what Matisse was to Picasso. Giotto is the master of the grand statement—grave, weighty figures acting out the human drama on a spatially cogent stage. Duccio is the great colorist. The space of his pictures is more perceptual than rational, and he explored a more lyrical, tender emotional range."

Scholars have drawn an analogy between Duccio’s infusion of life into timeworn Byzantine schemes, and the popular devotional poetry of the Franciscans, on the one hand, and the exalted love poetry of Dante, on the other. As in the writing of Dante and the painting of Giotto, religious subjects are treated in terms of human experience, thereby marking a fundamental change in Western culture.

"So profound is the change that animates Duccio’s art during these years," said Mr. Christiansen, "that art historians understandably presume an external stimulus. This must have been a trip to Assisi, where Duccio studied the recently completed fresco cycle of the life of Saint Francis by Giotto and a large équippe of assistants. It has now been demonstrated that this celebrated fresco cycle was completed prior to 1295–96. What impressed Duccio were the illusionistic devices Giotto introduced to frame the individual scenes as well as his ability to create a cogent, pictorial space inhabited by figures possessing weight and density. It was an art that embraced the complex and varied world of human experience, rather than one based on codified types, as had been the case with medieval and Byzantine painting. Duccio responded by exploring in his own art this new world of sentiment and emotional response, but with a lyricism and sensitivity to color that became the basis of Sienese painting. This new, complex vision attains its first clear statement in the Metropolitan Madonna and Child, and it is for this reason that this small panel intended for private devotion is so revolutionary."

In his 1979 monograph on Duccio, British scholar John White characterized the Metropolitan painting as "the first, lonely forerunner of that long line of Italian Madonnas with a parapet which achieved its finest flowering almost two centuries later in Giovanni Bellini’s splendid variations on the theme." This evaluation, based only on photographs (as the painting has been basically inaccessible for at least half a century), properly identifies the importance of this structuring motif for the history of painting, but it says little about the sheer beauty of Duccio’s work and the deeply moving conception of the Mother and Child. Nor does it address the sculptural quality of the Virgin, with her magnificently realized drapery—less like the sculpture of Giovanni Pisano, with which Duccio’s work is often compared, than classical sculpture.

The most eloquent appraisal of the picture came exactly a century ago. Mary Logan, wife of Bernard Berenson, the art critic and influential connoisseur of Italian Renaissance art, saw the original in its public debut at the milestone 1904 exhibition of Sienese painting at the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena: "Perhaps the most perfect work [in the exhibition] is the little Madonna of Duccio belonging to Count Gregory Stroganoff... which, small though it is, offers so much majesty, dignity, and profound sentiment. Taken alone, it is worth all the other paintings exhibited under the name of Duccio."

The Duccio painting will be on view in Gallery 3 of the Metropolitan Museum’s European Paintings Galleries.

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Exhibition Text Panel About Duccio’s Madonna and Child
Between about 1290 and 1310 Western art was redefined by two towering geniuses: Giotto (1266/67–1337), from Florence, and Duccio (act. by 1278, d. 1318), from Siena. Both artists explored different but complementary ways in which art could involve the viewer’s experience of the everyday world without losing a sense of the sacred. Giotto—first at Assisi in the 1290s and then in the Arena Chapel in Padua (ca. 1305)—emphasized a rigorously constructed space with three-dimensional figures in gravely meaningful poses. By contrast, Duccio emphasized color and delicately articulated figures to achieve a more lyrical but no less human effect. His art was more influenced by Byzantine than contemporary Roman practice. Like Giotto’s fresco cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padua, his magnificent Maestà altarpiece for the cathedral of Siena (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena) became a point of reference for the next generation of artists.

Although small in size, the Metropolitan’s newly acquired Madonna and Child is a landmark of European painting. The Madonna is shown as though standing behind a parapet—a device that simultaneously connects and separates the timeless, hieratic realm of the divine figures and the real space and time of the viewer. The gestures of Mary and Jesus are recognizably human yet imbued with sacred meaning. As in the contemporary poetry of Dante, so in Duccio’s art a naturalistic impulse enriches the religious theme. Because this picture was intended for private devotion (there are two candle burns along the bottom of the original frame), Duccio may have felt encouraged to explore a new, more intimate visual language. Painted about 1300, the picture marks the transition from Medieval to Renaissance image making and sets the stage for the achievement of such artists as Simone Martini, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Giovanni Bellini.

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Exhibition Text Panel About Duccio
Our knowledge of Duccio’s life comes entirely from documents relating to his activity as a painter, his ownership of property, and fines for misdemeanors. For example, in 1279 and 1302 he was fined for trespassing. There are records in 1302 of his refusal to fulfill his military obligations and of a further misdemeanor. Like all painters of the day, Duccio undertook a wide variety of tasks, ranging from decorating the account books of the fiscal branch (the Biccherna) of Sienese government to designing the enormous stained glass window in the apse of the cathedral of Siena (1287–88), to painting major altarpieces and small panels for private devotion. Only about a dozen independent works by the artist survive. Of his seven children, three became painters.

Duccio’s early paintings are still strongly indebted to the visual and iconographic traditions we associate with Byzantine art. He was in touch with the two leading Florentine painters, Cimabue and Giotto, and also knew northern Gothic art. Together with Giotto, his later works set the stage for the early Renaissance by endowing figures and objects with a physical and emotional dimension that, in retrospect, made earlier paintings seem mere images. The Metropolitan’s painting is among his first works in the new style, and its unknown owner must have appreciated the privileged access to the sacred figures that Duccio’s innovations gave him.

Timeline

• About 1280: Duccio’s earliest surviving painting, the Crevole Madonna (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena)
• 1285: The enormous panel of the Madonna and Child with angels for a religious confraternity in Santa Maria Novella, Florence (Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence)
• 1287–88: Design of the great circular window for Siena Cathedral
• About 1300: The Metropolitan’s Madonna and Child
• About 1308–11: The Maestà for the Siena Cathedral (Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, Siena)

Timeline of Art History
Read about topics related to Duccio in the Timeline of Art History.

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