Duccio's Maestà (1308-1311)

The Italian word maesta means "majesty." In art history, it designates a very specific type of image: the Virgin Mary enthroned in majesty, the Child Jesus on her knees, surrounded by a court of angels and saints.^[4] It is not a narrative scene — neither an Annunciation nor a Nativity — but an image of glory: Mary is presented in it as the Theotokos, the Mother of God, and as Queen of Heaven, seated amid the heavenly court that surrounds and honors her.

An image of the heavenly court

The Maestà belongs to the great family of images of the enthroned Virgin, inherited from Byzantine art in which Mary appears as Hodighitria ("she who shows the way") or enthroned with the Child. But the Western type of the maesta particularly develops the court: around the throne crowd rows of angels and the communion of saints, as around a sovereign. The image visually states a truth of faith: Mary is not isolated; she stands at the center of the Church of Heaven, surrounded by those who already reign with Christ.^[5]

The Sienese precedent

At Siena, Duccio's great Maestà was preceded by other venerated Marian images, in particular the Madonna degli occhi grossi ("Madonna of the big eyes"), an image of the second quarter of the thirteenth century (Master of Tressa), held to be miraculous: it is before her, according to tradition, that the Sienese prayed before the battle of Montaperti in 1260.^[6] According to an anonymous fourteenth-century Sienese chronicle, Duccio's Maestà replaced her on the high altar — the city offering its Queen a new image, worthy of its gratitude — but the exact identification of the image replaced remains debated among historians.^[7]

One cannot understand the Maestà without knowing that Siena had given itself to the Virgin. The cathedral itself is dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta, Our Lady of the Assumption. But it is a specific event that sealed this bond: the battle of Montaperti.

The gift of 1260

In 1260, Siena, Ghibelline, faced its great Guelph rival, Florence. On the eve of the confrontation, the Sienese gathered: the syndic Buonaguida — whom fifteenth-century accounts name Buonaguida Lucari — urged the people to give themselves to the Virgin, then, during a solemn procession to the cathedral, the keys of the city were laid upon the high altar and the entire city, with its contado, was given to Mary, "queen and empress of eternal life," by a solemn deed executed before a notary.^[8] The chronicle known as Paolo di Tommaso Montauri's places this donation on Thursday 2 September 1260. Two days later, on 4 September 1260, against all expectation, the small Sienese army crushed the Florentine host at Montaperti, on the banks of the Arbia.

The victory was experienced as a Marian grace. Siena was henceforth called the Civitas Virginis, the "city of the Virgin": Mary is not only its heavenly patroness but is held to be its true sovereign — and the motto Sena vetus civitas Virginis would appear on Sienese coinage.^[9][10] This conviction durably marked Sienese public life, down to later moments of danger when the city, through its magistrates, would solemnly "give itself again" to the Virgin.^[11]

A devotion become political and artistic

At Siena, Marian devotion is therefore not a private affair: it is the very identity of the city. That is why the commission of the Maestà was at once a religious and a civic act, and its installation a festival for the whole town. The same conviction would inspire, a few years later, the Maestà painted in fresco by Simone Martini — probable pupil and collaborator of Duccio — on the wall of the Sala del Mappamondo in the Palazzo Pubblico, completed in 1315 then partly reworked in 1321: the Virgin-Queen watching over the good government of Siena.^[12] Sacred image and city life are one.

On 9 October 1308, Jacomo del fu Giliberto Mariscotti, operaio of the Opera del Duomo — the institution in charge of the cathedral fabric —, acting on behalf of the Opera, concluded with Duccio the deed governing the execution of the great altarpiece for the high altar.^[13] The surviving document (Archivio dell'Opera, parchment no. 603, published by Gaetano Milanesi in 1854) tells us how a holy image was commissioned at the beginning of the fourteenth century.

The terms of the contract

Duccio undertakes to paint the panel "as best he can and knows how, and as the Lord shall grant him" (quam melius poterit et sciverit, et Dominus sibi largietur), to work on it without interruption and to accept no other work until its completion.^[14] He swears this solemnly, his hand on the Gospels, "in good faith, without fraud" (bona fide, sine fraude). He is paid sixteen soldi of Sienese denari per day of work done by his own hands — ten lire paid each month in coin, the balance deducted from what he himself owes the Opera — and it is the operaio, on behalf of the Opera, who supplies all the materials: Duccio is to put into the work "only his person and his labor."^[15]

"To paint and make the said panel as best he can and knows how, and as the Lord shall grant him." — Contract of 9 October 1308 between the Opera del Duomo and Duccio^[16]

These clauses are not incidental. To pay the master for each day worked by his own hands, for an image destined for worship, is to recognize that the sacred image commits the one who executes it: it is born of a personal act of belief, performed under oath. Here we find again, in contractual form, the intuition of the Eastern tradition that one "writes" an icon rather than painting it.

The master: Duccio di Buoninsegna

Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255/1260 – 1318/1319), born and died at Siena, is regarded as the founder of the Sienese school of painting.^[17] Before the Maestà, he had already signed a famous great Marian image: the Rucellai Madonna, commissioned in April 1285 by the Florentine confraternity of the Laudesi for Santa Maria Novella — today in the Uffizi.^[18] Trained in the Byzantine tradition (the maniera greca), nourished by the example of Cimabue, a contemporary of Giotto, Duccio holds a pivotal place: he softens Byzantine rigor without renouncing it, introducing grace, gentleness and humanity into an image still wholly steeped in the sacred.^[19]

The Maestà was a work of unprecedented scale and complexity: a two-sided altarpiece, raised upon the high altar and visible from both sides.^[20] According to the most common explanation, this double face answered the work's position: toward the nave and the faithful turned the glory of the Mother of God; toward the liturgical choir, the mystery of the Son.

The front face: for the faithful

Turned toward the people was the Virgin in majesty, an image of glory and prayer. Above the great central panel, gables depicted the last days of the Virgin — from the announcement of her death to her entombment, six scenes surviving, the lost central panels no doubt corresponding to the Assumption and the Coronation —; below, a predella narrated Christ's infancy in seven scenes, interspersed with six figures of prophets: Isaiah, Ezekiel, Solomon, Malachi, Jeremiah and Hosea.^[21]

The reverse face: for the clergy

Turned toward the choir unfolded the great Passion cycle: twenty-six scenes spread over two registers and fourteen compartments — the Entry into Jerusalem and the Crucifixion, of double height, each occupying two superimposed scenes. The lower predella showed Christ's public life (nine probable scenes, eight surviving); the upper gables, the appearances of the Risen Christ up to Pentecost; little angels crowned the pinnacles.^[22] Thus the image served two complementary contemplations: to the faithful, the glory of the Mother of God; to the clergy, the paschal mystery of the Son, the source of that glory.

The whole, tempera and gold on poplar wood, counts more than forty figures on the front face alone and twenty-six scenes on the reverse; the central panel measures 214 × 412 cm.^[23]

The central panel — 2.14 m high by 4.12 m wide — shows Mary enthroned, the Child Jesus on her left arm, at the center of a hierarchically ordered assembly of angels and saints.^[24] It is the heart of the work, and the summit of Duccio's art.

The heavenly court

Around the great marble throne, twenty angels bow and contemplate, ten on each side; behind and beside them stand six saints: on the left, Catherine of Alexandria, Paul and John the Evangelist; on the right, John the Baptist, Peter and Agnes — each recognizable by his or her attributes and, for most, by the name painted beside them.^[25] Above, beneath arcading, the ten other apostles in bust complete the apostolic college: Thaddeus, Simon, Philip, James the Greater and Andrew on the left; Matthew, James the Less, Bartholomew, Thomas and Matthias on the right.^[26] The whole communion of saints surrounds the Queen, in an order that is not worldly disorder but liturgical harmony: each has his place in glory.

The four kneeling patrons of Siena

In the foreground, kneeling close to the throne, four saints intercede for the city: on the left Ansanus, the baptizer of the Sienese, then Savinus, the martyr bishop, in the place of honor near the throne; on the right Crescentius, the child martyr, then Victor, the soldier, at the far right.^[27] Their position — kneeling, ahead of the others, turned toward the Virgin — gives the whole composition its meaning: it is Siena herself, through her patrons, who prostrates herself before her Queen and entrusts her life to her. The image does not merely illustrate a dogma: it accomplishes a civic and collective act of devotion.

A Queen clothed in humility

A notable theological detail: the Virgin is not covered in sumptuous royal ornaments. Her great dark-blue mantle envelops her with an almost monastic simplicity. Her majesty does not lie in earthly pomp, but in her divine motherhood and her holiness: she is Queen because she is the Mother of God, not through outward splendor.^[28]

On the step of the throne runs a painted inscription, the work's spiritual signature: "Holy Mother of God, be the cause of peace for Siena; be life for Duccio, because he painted you thus."^[29]

This inscription is remarkable on more than one count. First, it is a prayer, not a descriptive label: the image addresses the Virgin, asking her for two graces — peace (requies) for the city, and life (salvation) for the artist. Next, it seals the unity between the city, the artist and the Queen: Siena, Duccio and Mary are bound in a single act of trust. Finally, it states the deep conviction of medieval sacred art: to paint the Virgin "thus", that is, worthily, is in itself a meritorious act, a service rendered to God for which the artist hopes, in return, for eternal life.^[30] The image is not an object: it is a dialogue offered to the one it represents — exactly as the icon, whose honor rendered "passes to its prototype."^[31]

On the reverse, Duccio unfolds one of the vastest narratives of the Passion in all medieval painting: twenty-six scenes retracing the drama of salvation, from the Entry into Jerusalem to the appearances of the Risen Christ, by way of the Supper, the Agony, the Arrest, the Trial, the Crucifixion and the Entombment.^[32]

Storytelling ordered to prayer

This narrative cycle was not meant for the distracted glance. Turned toward the choir, it accompanied the prayer of the clergy: during the office and Mass, the priests had before their eyes the paschal mystery they were celebrating. The reverse face is thus a continuous meditation on the Passion, articulated with the Marian glory of the front: it is because the Son died and rose again that the Mother is crowned.^[33] In it Duccio unfolds a narrative art of new vividness — gestures, glances, architecture, emotions — which already heralds the narrative painting of the following centuries, while keeping the gold ground of eternity.

A summit of narrative art

In these small panels, Duccio reveals himself an incomparable storyteller: he knows how to suggest space, to give crowds a presence, to charge faces with a restrained sorrow or tenderness. The Betrayal of Judas, the Denial of Peter, the women at the tomb count among the most moving pages of Trecento painting.^[34] Here sacred art never sacrifices prayer to spectacle: each scene remains ordered to faith.

The Maestà holds a pivotal place in the history of the sacred image in the West. Duccio inherits the Byzantine icon — the maniera greca — but he transforms it, opening the way to a new manner of representing the sacred.^[35]

What Duccio keeps of the icon

From the Byzantine tradition, Duccio keeps the essential: the gold ground, which is not decoration but the very light of God, his eternity present everywhere; the majesty of the enthroned figure; the consecrated type of the Virgin and Child; and above all the function — the image is made for prayer, not for ornament.^[36] On the theological meaning of the gold ground, the halo and sourceless light, see the theology of the icon.

What Duccio invents

But Duccio softens the hard lines of the icon. Faces grow gentler, modeling gives the draperies volume, the Virgin's mantle falls in supple, living folds. Above all, he introduces a new tenderness into the relationship between Mother and Child: Mary no longer merely "points to" the Savior with the solemnity of the Hodighitria; she carries him with a human gentleness.^[37] This humanization does not weaken the sacred: it brings it nearer, faithful to the mystery of the Incarnation, in which God made himself truly man and truly a child.

Duccio and Giotto: two paths for one mystery

Duccio is the contemporary of Giotto, the Florentine master who, at the same moment, revolutionized painting through the weight of bodies, the depth of space and human drama. The two men open Western art to reality — but by distinct paths. Where Giotto seeks gravity and sculptural volume, Duccio keeps the melodic grace of line and the splendor of Byzantine gold.^[38] The Sienese school he founds will long favor this lyrical beauty, Marian and luminous, which will culminate in Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers.^[39]

It would be wrong to reduce the Maestà to a milestone in art history. For Siena and for the Church, it is first a painted confession of faith, on the same footing as the icon.

What the image proclaims of Mary

By depicting Mary enthroned with the Child, the image confesses that she is the Theotokos, the Mother of God — the title proclaimed by the Council of Ephesus in 431: Mary truly became Mother of God, because it is from her that the Word took his body.^[40] By showing her as Queen amid the heavenly court, it proclaims her glorification: the Immaculate Virgin, "taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, and exalted by the Lord as Queen of the universe."^[41] The Maestà gives visible form to this truth — precisely what the summit gables depict.

Veneration, not adoration

The court surrounding Mary — angels, saints, kneeling patrons — renders the Virgin immense honor; but this honor is not the adoration due to God alone. The Church honors Mary with a special cult, unique in kind, which "for all its uniqueness, is yet entirely particular; it is to be clearly distinguished from the cult of adoration which is offered equally to the Incarnate Word as to the Father and to the Holy Spirit, and it is most favorable to it."^[42]

"This cult, as it has always existed in the Church, for all its uniqueness, is yet entirely particular; it is to be clearly distinguished from the cult of adoration [...]; it is most favorable to it." — Vatican II, constitution Lumen Gentium, no. 66^[43]

Honoring the Mother leads to the Son: Marian devotion, however ardent, is never confused with the adoration due to God alone. On this decisive distinction, see the theology of the icon.

An image for praying

The Maestà was, for centuries, the place where Siena prayed to its Queen. The footstool inscription says it plainly: the work was not contemplated, those who stood before it addressed the one it makes present. That is the property of the sacred image — whether Eastern icon or Western altarpiece: to be a window onto Heaven, through which gaze and heart pass to the person depicted, never stopping at the wood and gold.

"The honor rendered to an image passes to its prototype, and whoever venerates an image venerates in it the person depicted therein." — Saint Basil and the Second Council of Nicaea (787), quoted by the Catechism of the Catholic Church^[44]

The completion of the Maestà gave rise to one of the loveliest religious festivals of the Italian Middle Ages. On 9 June 1311, a Wednesday, the altarpiece was carried from Duccio's workshop — the house of the Muciatti, outside the Stalloreggi gate — to the cathedral, in solemn procession through the whole city, around the Campo.^[45]

The chronicles' account

Two Sienese chronicles recount the festival. The anonymous fourteenth-century chronicle describes the shops closed by order of the bishop, the great and devout company of priests and friars, the lords of the Nine and all the officers of the commune, the worthiest bearing lighted candles, then behind them the women and children, the bells all ringing for glory — and the prayer to God and to his Mother, "our advocate," to defend Siena from every peril.^[46] The chronicle known as Agnolo di Tura del Grasso's (Cronaca maggiore) specifies that the procession marched behind Bishop Ruggero da Casole, a Dominican, and that the work cost three thousand gold florins.^[47]

"The Sienese led the panel to the cathedral on 9 June, with great devotion and in procession, with the bishop of Siena, all the clergy and all the religious, the lords and officers of the city, lighted candles in hand — and behind them, the women and children. [...] All the shops remained closed out of devotion." — after the Sienese chronicle known as Agnolo di Tura del Grasso's, Cronaca maggiore, fourteenth century^[48]

This procession says everything: for Siena, this was not the delivery of a work of art but the enthronement of a Queen. The boundary between art, liturgy and civic life had entirely disappeared.

The Maestà remained on the high altar until 8 July 1506, when it was removed to make room for a ciborium — then displayed in other parts of the cathedral. It was probably at that time that the predella and gables were detached from the main body.^[49] On 18 July 1777 — the date long given as 1771 — the work was transferred to the church of Sant'Ansano, and on 1 August the altarpiece was sawn through its thickness to separate the two faces: the saw slipped and wounded the very face of the Virgin.^[50] In 1789, both faces returned to the cathedral; in 1878, with the panels kept in the sacristy, they entered the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo.^[51]

The dispersed panels

Eight narrative panels of the Maestà are today outside Siena, dispersed through the art market in the nineteenth century^[60]

Four pinnacle angels have further been identified, one of them in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.^[61]

Today

The bulk of the ensemble — the great central panel and many scenes — is today kept in Siena's Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, where the two faces, now separated, are displayed separately in the same room.^[62] The great image that made a city's unity has known, by a sad irony, dispersion — but its heart remains at Siena, still offered to gaze and prayer.

Duccio's Maestà recalls a truth our age, saturated with disposable images, tends to forget: an image can be a place of presence and truth, not a mere ornament or a passing stream. Born of a solemn gift, funded by an entire city, painted "with his own hands" by a master who staked his salvation on it, carried in procession as one welcomes a Queen, it was for centuries the visible hearth of a living faith.

It also says something permanent about Mary's place in Catholic faith: not a goddess to be adored, but the glorified Mother of God, Queen and intercessor, at the heart of the communion of saints, ever leading to Christ. And it bears witness, finally, to the fruitfulness of beauty: in carrying the Byzantine icon toward a more human tenderness, losing nothing of the sacred, Duccio showed that Christian art could both renew itself and remain prayer. That is the whole meaning of the gesture by which, on 9 June 1311, an entire city bowed, candles in hand, before an image — not of wood and gold, but the face of its Queen.

Related Ignispedia articles

• The theology of the icon — the doctrine of the sacred image, its foundation in the Incarnation and the veneration / adoration distinction, of which the Maestà is a radiant Western application.
• Byzantine icons — the iconographic tradition Duccio inherits and transforms.
• Christ Pantocrator — the great icon of Christ, another major type of sacred image.
• Our Lady of Vladimir — the Marian icon of tenderness, to compare with the new gentleness of Duccio's Virgin.
• Raphael's Transfiguration — the sacred image in the age of the full Renaissance, the endpoint of the path opened by Duccio and Giotto.
• Gothic as a theology of light — the artistic and spiritual context of Duccio's time.

Principal sources

• Contract of 9 October 1308 between the operaio Jacomo Mariscotti, on behalf of Siena's Opera del Duomo, and Duccio (Archivio dell'Opera, parchment no. 603) — published by Gaetano Milanesi, Documenti per la storia dell'arte senese, vol. I, Siena, 1854, doc. no. 22, pp. 166-168.
• Anonymous fourteenth-century Sienese chronicle (years 1202-1362) and chronicle known as Agnolo di Tura del Grasso's (Cronaca maggiore) — ed. Alessandro Lisini and Fabio Iacometti, Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new ed., vol. XV, part 6: Cronache senesi, Bologna, 1931-1939, pp. 58, 90 and 313-314.
• L. A. Muratori (ed.), Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, vol. XV, Milan, 1729, col. 47 — chronicle text of the 1311 passage under the names of Andrea Dei and Agnolo di Tura.
• C. Eubel, Hierarchia catholica medii aevi, vol. I, 2nd ed., Münster, 1913, p. 446 — Bishop Ruggero da Casole.
• John White, Duccio: Tuscan Art and the Medieval Workshop, London, Thames and Hudson, 1979.
• James H. Stubblebine, Duccio di Buoninsegna and His School, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1979, 2 vols.
• Diana Norman, Siena and the Virgin: Art and Politics in a Late Medieval City State, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1999.
• A. Bagnoli, R. Bartalini, L. Bellosi and M. Laclotte (eds.), Duccio: alle origini della pittura senese, Milan, Silvana Editoriale, 2003 — Siena exhibition, 2003-2004.
• Dillian Gordon, The Italian Paintings before 1400 (National Gallery Catalogues), London, National Gallery Company, 2011 — entry "Maestà Predella Panels".
• Jane Immler Satkowski, Duccio di Buoninsegna: The Documents and Early Sources, ed. Hayden B. J. Maginnis, Athens (GA), Georgia Museum of Art, 2000.
• Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena — conservation entry (operaduomo.siena.it); Fondazione Federico Zeri, online catalogue — main panel entry (dimensions).
• The National Gallery, London — entries NG 1139, NG 1140, NG 1330 and Gordon 2011 catalogue; National Gallery of Art, Washington — Mellon and Kress panels; Frick Collection, New York — Temptation on the Mountain; Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid — Christ and the Samaritan Woman.
• Council of Ephesus (431), Theotokos; Vatican II, Lumen Gentium, ch. VIII (nos. 59 and 66); Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 466, 495, 966, 971, 1161, 2131-2132.