Duccio di Buoninsegna

On 9 June 1311 the city of Siena, in Tuscany in central Italy, closed its shops and staged a procession. Priests, the city's governing council and ordinary citizens walked candles in hand from Duccio di Buoninsegna's workshop to the cathedral, escorting a single altarpiece to its place on the high altar. It was called the Maestà, the Madonna in Majesty, and it had taken Duccio and his workshop about three years to complete.

The panel was enormous for its time and painted on both sides, a golden enthroned Madonna and Child facing the congregation on the front, and on the back, out of public view, forty-three small scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin arranged like a picture book. Duccio was already the leading painter of Siena's own school, working in the gold-ground Byzantine tradition but softening its stiff figures with more natural gesture and drapery, a shift later Sienese painters built on for a generation.

The altarpiece was later cut apart and sold off in pieces during the 18th century. Most of it is now in Siena's cathedral museum, though individual panels ended up as far away as New York and Fort Worth, Texas.