4 - New Iconographies

Summary

The Sienese culture of innovation at this time was not purely in the realm of the formal, nor in respect of artists who looked across media and translated formal conventions from one type of object to another, or who transformed motifs from one scale to another. Sienese painters of the fourteenth century were also the generators of new compositions and iconographical forms. Simone Martini in particular, especially towards the end of his career, carried out a number of unusual, often bespoke, works for influential individuals, in which he developed new iconographical types. Similarly, the Sienese tabernacles under investigation here are innovative not just in their novel form and their combinations of materials and matter, but also because they utilise two new iconographical themes: the standing Virgin, and the Madonna of Humility. The image of the Virgin Mary in a standing position, holding her child in her arms, is common in sculpture of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but when it appeared in the central panels of two of these Sienese tabernacles it was unusual as a painted form. To some extent the adoption of this form in painting continues the general intermedial conversations across different types of visual and material culture that were discussed earlier, and which will be discussed again in more detail in relation to these particular objects. The Madonna of Humility, the Virgin Mary seated on the ground, rather than enthroned, and holding her child in her arms or on her lap, was another innovation in Italian painting at this time, though this image type seems not to have been carried across from existing sculptural forms, like the standing Virgin, but developed in the context of painted images during the middle years of the fourteenth century. These two new images, utilised in the Sienese reliquary tabernacles, will be discussed in turn here. This will mean, for the standing Virgin, revisiting two of the tabernacles discussed in Part I – the Cleveland and Berenson Collection/Milan tabernacles – in renewed detail, but for a different purpose. For the Madonna of Humility attention will turn to three tabernacles from later in the fourteenth century that have not yet been examined in detail.

THE STANDING VIRGIN

Two of the Sienese reliquary tabernacles, as well as a related triptych that does not contain relics (Fig. 35), each depict a full-length standing Virgin Mary as their centrepieces.