The Metropolitan Museum’s show of Sienese fifteenth-century painting was an apparently unexpected triumph, on several levels if not ail, for its artists and its installers.1 Tickets were not required to enter, unlike the case of the simultaneous O’Keeffe show in the building, yet the Sienese banner hung in the middle of the façade and O’Keeffe’s went to one side. There were reports in the holiday period of crowds thick enough to make the air unpleasant. If the people who have to guess what attendance will be had assumed a bigger draw for a show that was modern, American, and maybe feminist, thus requiring no work or background by the drop-in public, than for a display of mostly very small religious pictures, with obscure stories, from a secondary and now obsolete locus of European culture, they would have been as reasonable as conventional, yet some re-estimating may now occur. The museum did at least give the show a good send-off, unlike the nearly hidden one of Giovanni Pisano a year earlier. The difference had some connection, no doubt, with the active wish to do this show by the department of paintings, which manages far more of the museum’s well-attended shows than any other. It became one of the exhibitions “everybody” has seen, making an almost comic polarity with the just preceding status of the same kind of art; it is easy to imagine the inertial resistance to the unfashionable that would have met exhortations by specialists a year ago
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Sienese storytellers
On “Painting in Renaissance Siena, 1420–1500” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 7 Number 8, on page 45
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