Pietro Lorenzetti

Pietro Lorenzetti worked in Siena in the first half of the 14th century, when the city was one of the richest in Europe and its painters were rivalling Florence. He and his younger brother Ambrogio were the leading Sienese painters of their generation, and Pietro took the gold-ground tradition of his teacher Duccio and pushed it toward real weight and feeling.

In his frescoes of the Passion in the lower church at Assisi, and in altarpieces like the Birth of the Virgin, figures turn in believable space, grieve with real faces, and stand in rooms that seem to have depth. He was absorbing the new solidity of Giotto in Florence and folding it into the Sienese love of line and colour.

Then in 1348 the plague reached Siena and killed perhaps half the city. Both Lorenzetti brothers disappear from the records that year and are presumed to have died in the outbreak, leaving the Birth of the Virgin, finished around 1342, among the last major works either of them completed.