Santa Maria dei Servi

In September 1260 Siena defeated Florence at Montaperti, a few miles east of the city, and among the Florentine prisoners was a painter named Coppo di Marcovaldo. In 1261 he signed and dated a large panel of the Virgin and Child that now hangs in this hilltop basilica of the Servite friars. It is known as the Madonna del Bordone, and it is the only painting that can be given to Coppo with certainty. Tradition says it paid for his release.

Look closely at the two faces. About half a century later a Sienese painter reworked the heads of the Virgin and Child in the softer manner of Duccio, the leading painter in Siena at the time. X-rays show Coppo's harder, Byzantine-style features underneath.

The church itself took a long time to build. Work went on for more than a century before it was consecrated in 1533, and its brick façade was never finished. Inside, the Madonna shares the basilica with frescoes by Pietro Lorenzetti and his workshop from the 1330s, and with Matteo di Giovanni's Massacre of the Innocents, a crowded panel of soldiers and mothers dated 1491.