The National Gallery reunited scenes from Duccio's Maestà and panels of Simone Martini's Orsini polyptych in a survey of Sienese painting in the early fourteenth century.
The National Gallery in Trafalgar Square surveyed Sienese painting of the early fourteenth century from Saturday 8 March to Sunday 22 June 2025. It organised the exhibition with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
At the start of the 1300s, Duccio, Simone Martini and the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti developed a new way of painting in central Italy. In their work, faces showed emotion, bodies moved in space, and stories ran across panels.
The exhibition reunited scenes from Duccio’s Maestà altarpiece. Panels from Simone Martini’s Orsini polyptych came together for the first time in living memory.
Duccio’s The Raising of Lazarus (about 1308 to 1311) came from the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple (1342) came from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
More than a hundred exhibits made by artisans in Siena, Naples, Avignon showed metalworkers, weavers and carvers working alongside the painters. They included gilded glass, illuminated manuscripts, ivory Madonnas, rugs and silks.
The show also included Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Madonna del Latte. The back of Pietro Lorenzetti’s The Crucifixion, lent from New York, is painted to resemble marble, which suggests its panels formed a portable altarpiece.