A new exhibition at the National Gallery in London takes us back to the very origins of painting as the primary form of Western art.

The early years of the 14th century were a pivotal moment in art history. Some years before the full-throated advent of the Italian Renaissance, and cut short by the Black Death which swept across central Italy in 1350, a school of painters in the city of Siena prefigured the Western canon with a series of paintings in the service of Christian iconography. For the first time, these fragile, delicate and gilded works placed painting – rather than textile, sculpture or pottery – at the centre of Western art-making.

Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350, at the National Gallery, examines this extraordinary moment through the lives of four artists, Duccio di Buoninsegna, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Simone Martini, whose works have long been scattered among the museums of the world. Here reunited, their paintings illustrate how – even before the artists of the High Renaissance folded scientific study and humanism into their work – these four painters began to reach towards scholastic realism and narrative innovation, setting out a blueprint for centuries of artistic production to come.

In the traditional art-historical narrative, Siena has long been overshadowed by the later school of Florence, to which the energy of the High Renaissance moved following money and patronage. Later connoisseurs of the period liked to refer to what they saw as the “charm of the backwater” in Sienese art – yet The Rise of Painting is at pains to show, through textiles and ceramics, how Siena formed a key location on trade routes between the Islamic world and the West. Indeed, the earliest works in the exhibition show their heavy debts to the long tradition of icon-painting in the Byzantine Empire.

The exhibition, which has come to London after a spectacularly successful run at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is fascinating in its commitment to telling a story known better to art historians than to the general public, but also in how it relates the deep past of our current preoccupation with painting. As the New Yorker’s review put it, “We can’t feel the full Trecento shock of axial perspective anymore, but even the most familiar parts of these images still land with a slap.” 

Why do these works feel so powerful, even to jaded contemporary eyes? Is it the turbulent context from which they come – an Italy riven by rival city-states, on the cusp of a global pandemic? Or perhaps it’s their commitment to tradition undergirded by torrid innovation and change that feels so contemporary? Perhaps the sight of these gilded wonders, products of intense spiritual feeling and powerful, complex emotion, balancing religious austerity with the burgeoning humanistic exuberance of the gathering Renaissance, speak not to us but beyond us – and present us with the profound limitations of a moment in which art has not merely discarded its aura but become almost invisible, impossible, lost. But perhaps most compellingly, it is the astonishing sense, through a series of paintings that span merely half a century, of painting itself – a medium that feels so essential, so ubiquitous – coming into formation as art before our very eyes. .