Fifteenth-century Siena
Sienese Quattrocento Paintings. Edited by John Pope-Hennessy. (Phaidon Press. 20s.) Sienese Quattrocento Paintings. Edited by John Pope-Hennessy. (Phaidon Press. 20s.)
NOT infrequently nowadays the innocent reader of book reviews is led to believe that the critic, particularly when reviewing histories and books of scholarship, is somewhat better informed on the subject in question than the author. He, the critic, is kind but re- proving. Had he, the critic, had time, he would have written the book in question himself, rather better, but somehow he didn't. This attitude is very encouraging to the author, who has spent fifteen years or so upon the research into his subject. It shows that he has not been alone in his arduous study of the available material. Being a critic neither by inclination nor immensity of intellect, I was very pleased to read in the preface of this excellently compiled and elegantly produced book that it was an anthology of pictures and not a history of fifteenth-century Sienese painting. This was a great relief to me, for I should no more be competent to criticise a history by so justly celebrated a specialist on the subject as Mr. Pope-Hennessy than the late Mr. James Agate would have been suited to play the title-role in Hamlet.
The first sixty years of the Trecento are, I believe, generally considered the period in Which the art of Siena achieved its highest level, but since Bernard Berenson's championship of Sassetta in 1909, there has been an increasing enthusiasm for the later period ; indeed, Berenson himself was even brave and, I myself feel, over- enthusiastic enough to compare Sassetta with Giotto to the latter's disadvantage. Mr. Pope-Hennessy, on the other hand, has con- tributed scarcely less notably and rather more circumspectly to the comparatively sparse liteFature on Sienese painting. There is no question of the extreme delicacy, sensitivity and accomplishment of Sienese art during the Quattrocento, although the supremacy had passed to Florence, and the period in Siena was one of fascinating decadence. At no time can the art of Siena be said to rival that of Quattrocento Florence in the plastic monumentality and integra- tion of form achieved by Giotto and later by Masaccio and those who followed him.
Sienese art relied upon a mystical intensity, a jewelled quality of surface and a supreme linear elegance, eschewing chiaroscuro in all save its last developments and clinging tenaciously to an archaic mode of expression. It was a mode of expression which inevitably became primarily decorative when the austere doctrines of mediaeval Christianity lost ground before the humanism of the Florentines. But even in the decadence much of Sienese painting has a flowerlike grace unmarred by the plagues and defeats to which the unhappy city was occasionally subjected. This book, like so many bearing the famous imprint of Phaidon, must inevitably find a place on the shelves of both painters and connoisseurs. MICHAEL AYRTON.
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