La storia
To see where the Sienese school of painting made its home, you go to two Gothic palaces on a narrow street in Siena. The Pinacoteca Nazionale holds the finest collection anywhere of that school, the painters who, in the 13th and 14th centuries, rivalled Florence with a softer, more decorative and more devout kind of art.
The walls glow with gold. Here are panels by Duccio, whose Madonnas set the pattern for a century, by Simone Martini, and by the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, whose careers were cut short when the Black Death reached Siena in 1348. Their saints and Virgins stand against burnished gold skies, tender and grave.
Because almost all of it was painted for Sienese churches and altars, the collection is really the city looking back at its own golden age on the walls.
