The Cathedral of Siena
The Cathedral of Siena* by Esther Singleton is a detailed art-historical and descriptive study of the Duomo di Siena — the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta — one of the supreme achievements of Italian Gothic architecture and one of the richest repositories of medieval and Renaissance art in Europe. Singleton approaches the cathedral systematically, tracing the building's origins from its Romanesque foundations in the twelfth century through the ambitious Gothic campaigns of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when Sienese civic pride and religious devotion fueled an extraordinary program of construction and artistic embellishment. She examines the fateful project to expand the cathedral into what would have been the largest church in Christendom — the so-called Duomo Nuovo — and explains how the Black Death of 1348 and structural failures brought those grandiose plans to ruin, leaving the extant nave as only a transept of what was planned. The incomplete walls of the abandoned expansion, she observes, remain standing as a monument to civic ambition cut short. The book gives substantial attention to the cathedral's exterior, with careful analysis of the striped black-and-white marble banding that distinguishes Sienese Gothic from Florentine models and that unifies facade, campanile, and interior in a coherent decorative logic. Singleton surveys the sculptural program of the facade, largely the work of Giovanni Pisano, whose straining, emotionally expressive prophets and sibyls she discusses in the context of his revolutionary departure from the more serene classicism of his father, Nicola Pisano. Nicola Pisano's celebrated hexagonal pulpit, completed in 1268, receives close examination. Singleton describes each of its relief panels — the Nativity, Adoration of the Magi, Presentation in the Temple, Massacre of the Innocents, Crucifixion, and Last Judgment — analyzing how Nicola synthesized antique sarcophagus reliefs with medieval narrative conventions to produce a sculptural style of unprecedented classical weight and figural density. She places the Siena pulpit in dialogue with Nicola's earlier Baptistery pulpit in Pisa, tracing the evolution of his formal vocabulary. The famous inlaid marble pavement of the cathedral interior — the pavimento — receives extended treatment. Singleton describes the more than fifty panels of graffito and intarsia marble covering the entire floor, produced over two centuries by a succession of Sienese artists including Matteo di Giovanni and Domenico Beccafumi. The subjects range from sibyls and Old Testament narratives to allegorical scenes of Virtue, and Singleton emphasizes the pavement's unusual distinction of being both a liturgical text underfoot and a gallery of virtuoso craftsmanship. The Piccolomini Library, built to house the books of Pope Pius II and frescoed by Pinturicchio between 1502 and 1507, is treated as one of the high-water marks of the Sienese Renaissance. Singleton describes the ten fresco lunettes depicting scenes from the life of Pius II — from his early career as a humanist scholar and diplomat to his elevation to the papacy and his ultimately futile crusade against the Turks — praising Pinturicchio's luminous color, his delight in landscape and architectural setting, and the festive worldliness that distinguishes these scenes from more conventionally devotional fresco cycles. She also notes the famous group of Three Graces at the library's center, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic original that exerted visible influence on the surrounding paintings. Donatello's contributions to the cathedral's artistic furnishings — including his bronze pavement roundels, his statue of John the Baptist, and his relief of the Feast of Herod in the Baptistery — are analyzed with attention to how his Florentine sculptural radicalism sat within the more conservative Sienese artistic environment. The Piccolomini Altar draws Singleton's attention as an early showcase for Michelangelo, who carved four of its niched statues — Peter, Paul, Pius I, and Gregory — as a young man still learning his craft. She reads these figures against his later monumental works, noting the already characteristic idealization of anatomy and the suppressed dynamism coiled within their relatively conventional poses. Singleton also covers the Baptistery of San Giovanni beneath the cathedral's choir, with its gilded bronze font bearing reliefs by Donatello, Jacopo della Quercia, and Lorenzo Ghiberti — a collaborative monument that concentrated in a single object three of the defining sculptors of the early Quattrocento. Throughout, Singleton writes for the educated general reader rather than the specialist, providing sufficient historical and iconographic context to orient a visitor while maintaining the pleasures of vivid descriptive prose. The book situates the cathedral not merely as an aesthetic object but as the embodiment of Siena's medieval civic identity, religious life, and competitive relationship with Florence — a monument whose art must be read against the political and spiritual ambitions of the republic that produced it.
By Esther Singleton · First published 1909 · Genre: Architecture, Art History, Travel Writing