Home	Simone Martini: The Life of Simone [Martini] of Siena [c.1284-1344]
	Simone Martini (1280/ 5-1344). Of Duccio's pupils and followers, Meo da Siena, Ugolino da Siena, and Segna di Buonaventura appear less gifted as individuals and are bound by Byzantine conventions, while Simone Martini develops the Sienese style to international proportions. Martini was born in 1284. Though little is known of his artistic origins (Vasari gives Giotto as his teacher) he appears as a fully developed master when he painted the Majestas in the Sala del Consiglio of the Siena Town Hall in 1315. In 1315 (July 23rd) he is recorded as a "knight" at the court in Naples; and at the request of King Robert he painted in 1317 a panel of St. Louis, the brother of the king, who was canonized that year. Two signed altars for Pisa and Orvieto were painted in 1320. The following two years he was back in Siena and was paid (Dec. 1321) to restore his own Majestas in the town hall. In 1324 he married Giovanna, the daughter of a painter Memmo di Filipuccio. Various records list payments for many altarpieces and small decorations, probably by his shop, such as gilded ornaments and coats of arms (1327). In 1328 he painted the fresco of Guidoriccio in the town hall opposite his Majestas. In 1339 he and his brother Donatus were appointed procuratores of Ser Andrea di Marcovaldo, the rector of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Siena to the Romana Curia, i.e., the papal court, at Avignon, probably for the purpose of settling legal difficulties between the papal curia and local church properties. That same year Simone, his wife, and his brother left for Avignon; and he remained there until his death in 1344. An indication of his fame, aside from the authenticated record of his own works and activities, is given in the sonnets (the 49th, 50th and 86th) and letters of his friend Petrarch, who praises a portrait he made of Laura and claims him an equal to Giotto. The most significant works by Martini are probably the Majestas and the Guidoriccio frescos of 1315 and 1328 in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, and the Annunciation in the Uffizi. The first is undoubtedly influenced by Duccio's Majestas -- a Madonna Enthroned with hosts of angels and saints, among them the same four patrons of the city in the front row. But where the front panel of Duccio's altar was still more rigidly Byzantine, the spirit and form of Martini's rendition has grown within the sphere of the international (French) Gothic style, which may have been affected through the medium of French miniatures. The characteristics of the style can be noted in the more graceful pose and draping of the Virgin; the Gothic throne upon which She sits, and the crown She wears; the elaborate decorative canopy overhead; the more loosely and gracefully grouped figures of the accompanying hosts; and the addition of the motif noted in Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna of angels kneeling at the foot of the throne offering gifts to the queenly Virgin. The color, too, has an even luminous decorative quality strongly reminiscent of Gothic tapestries of the North. A verse which in spirit and in actual meter already shows the influence of Dante, is inscribed below and ends with an incomplete line naming Simone: S. a man di Symone. The decorative frame of the fresco contains medallions of the Saviour, the Evangelists, saints and prophets, two half-length figures personifying the Old and New Law holding scrolls with the Decalogue and Seven Sacraments, and didactic verses exhorting the spectator to a virtuous government in Her city -- the Civitas Virginis. A more developed Gothic form appears in the signed (Simon de Senis me pinxit) altar in the Museum of Naples with St. Louis of Toulouse enthroned crowning his brother, King Robert, in the central panel and five predellas representing scenes from the saint's life. The panel is not dated, but was certainly executed either at the same time or shortly after the canonization of the popular Franciscan bishop ( 1317) by honoring whom King Robert might well have sought to enhance the position of himself and the House of Anjou. The two signed altars of 1320, however, show a reversion to the Duccio manner. The polyptych originally painted for the high altar of Santa Caterina, the fragments of which are now in that church and the Museum of Pisa, represents half-length Madonna and Saints. The polyptych for San Domenico of Orvieto, now in the Cathedral Opera there, with half-length figures of the Virgin and saints, has likewise much of the sober, more monumental form of the older style. Shortly after the completion of these two altars Simone executed a series of frescos in the Chapel of St. Martin in San Francesco, Assisi. Represented are ten scenes from the life of St. Martin, a number of saints and a portrait of the donor, Cardinal Gentile da Montefiore (d. 1312), kneeling before St. Martin over the entrance arch. The narratives are told again with many figures and much factual detail, but with a general emphasis on a more spiritual content, whereby both the architecture of the chapel and its fresco decoration present a harmonious and coloristically well-integrated Gothic style. To the same project belonged, pzobably, the decoration of the St. Louis Chapel opposite, now destroyed, and the frescos of the transept of the lower church, at which Simone was assisted by several helpers. The fresco portrait of the condottiere, Guidoriccio Ricci dei Foligni da Reggio, was executed in 1328 on the wall opposite the Majestas in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena in honor of his capture of Montemassi that same year, which is represented with a second captured town, Sassaforte, in the background, on either side of the mounted warrior. Interesting narrative and realistic details may be noted in the representation of the besieger's camp, the fences with pikes leaning against them. The landscape itself is stylized in Gothic fashion, and against it the striding horseman is set off in sharp relief. The figure is probably a realistic likeness; its forward stride and flowing drapery are stylized into a graceful Gothic design. Effective too is the luminous black and yellow-gold of the figure as against the receding color values of the landscape. Perhaps the finest single example of the Sienese Gothic style is the altar, with the Annunciation and Saints Ansanus and Giulietta, which was painted for the chapel of St. Ansanus in the Cathedral of Siena and is now in the Uffizi gallery. From the inscription (Simon Martini et Lippus Memmi de Senis me pinxerunt Anno Domini MCCCXXXIII) the panel was painted in 1333 by Simone and his brother-in-law, Lippo Memmi. The duller coloration and design of the two accompanying saints seem to indicate the work of the inferior master, Lippo. Simone's late work at Avignon brings him in close contact with the international traffic of the papal court. His chief works there are the badly damaged fscos representing the battle of St. George with the dragon, a fragment of the Saviour with angels in the narthex, and a fragment representing the Virgin with the kneeling Cardinal Stefaneschi, all in Notre Dame des Domes in Avignon. Possible variations of the spacious St. George composition may be found in a drawing of the Vatican Library and miniatures of the St. George Codex in the archives of St. Peter's in Rome. Simone's further connection with miniature painting may be inferred from the miniature which he is said by Petrarch to have painted in the poet's copy of Virgil, now in the Ambrosian Library of Milan. A small signed and dated panel of 1342: representing Christ's Return from the Temple in the Walker Gallery of Liverpool and sections of a Passion altar in the Louvre, the Berlin, and Antwerp museums reveal the decorative grace and lyric idealism of this international style associated particularly with miniature painting. Of Simone's followers, Lippo Memmi, his brother-in-law, and Donato, his brother, had assisted him in his shop. Lippo is otherwise chiefly known for the large fresco variation of Simone's Majestas which he and his father, Memmo di Filipuccio, painted for the Town Hall of San Gimignano only two years after Simone had completed his. Some of the frescos in the right transept of San Francesco in Assisi, particularly the famous half-length St. Francis and St. Clare, may possibly have been done by Donato about the same time as Simone's decoration of the St. Martin chapel. A third follower is Barna da Siena, whose chief work is the fresco series of scenes from the life of Christ in the Collegiata of San Gimignano. The frescos of Matteo da Viterbo in the Salle de l'Audience and the chapels of St. Martial and St. John in the papal palace at Avignon reveal the same combination of Sienese and French Gothic characteristics which were noted in Simone's Avignon work and which play a considerable role in the development of French easel painting of the fourteenth century. Pietro Lorenzetti (active 1305-ca. 1348). Of the two brothers Pietro is probably the older and Ambrogio the more famous; the actual records of them in the sources are sparing. Pietro was born probably about 1280, is mentioned for the first time in 1305 as having been paid by the Siena Council of Nine for a painting, and was paid for an altar by Guido Tarlati, Bishop of Arezzo, in 1320. The only work in which both the brothers seem to have collaborated and which is mentioned by older commentators up to and including Vasari are the 1335 frescos of the Scala Hospital (lost after 1720). Vasari gives the signature as reading Hoc opus fecit Petrus Laurentii et Ambrosius eius frater MCCCXXXV. A considerable number of altars by Pietro are signed and dated up to 1342. The most important of these is the polyptych of the Pieve in Arezzo, done 1320 for Bishop Tarlati (signed Petrus Laurentii hanc pinxit dextra senensis) representing a half-length Madonna between Saints John the Evangelist, Donatus, John the Baptist, and Matthew, with other half-length saints, an Annunciation and Ascension above. The style is that of a fully developed master and contains a very human grace and spiritual dignity which has its origin in Duccio's Majestas, but has developed far beyond that master's relative stiffness in a manner parallel to Giovanni Pisano and considerably different from Simone Martini. An earlier panel in the Poldi-Pezzoli gallery of Milan indicates a possible transition from the style of Duccio to the Tarlati altar. The chief authenticated altarpieces following this are: the Madonna with saints and angels in St. Ansano in Dofana (signed and dated 1328), the predellas in the Siena Academy depicting four scenes from the history of the Carmelite order, done ca. 1329 for a lost altar of San Niccolo del Carmine (of which the Dofana Madonna may have been the center piece), and the altar with the Nativity in the Opera del Duomo in Siena, signed and dated 1342. All of these, particularly the last, show a gradual tendency to combine many plastically modeled (much more so than Simone's) figures decoratively into an integrated space and architecture in a specifically Sienese (i.e., Ducciesque) manner, yet related to that of Giotto's followers.