Painting in Renaissance Siena
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Figure r6 . Vecchietta. The Resurrection. Figure I7. Donatello. The Blood of the Redeemer. Spedale Maestri, Torrita The Frick Collection, New York the Redeemer (fig. I?), in the Spedale Maestri in Torrita, southeast of Siena, was, in fact, the common source for Vecchietta and Francesco di Giorgio. The work is generally dated to the 1430s and has been associated, conjecturally, with Donatello's tabernacle for Saint Peter's in Rome. 16 However, it was first mentioned in the nirieteenth century, when it adorned the fa<;ade of the church of the Madonna della Neve in Torrita, and it is difficult not to believe that the relief was deposited in that provincial outpost of Sienese territory following modifications in the cathedral of Siena in the seventeenth or eighteenth century. A date for the relief in the late I4 5os is not impossible. There is, in any event, a curious similarity between Donatello's inclusion of two youthful angels standing on the edge of the lunette to frame the composition and Vecchietta's introduction of two adoring angels on rocky mounds in his Resurrection. It may be said with little exaggeration that in Siena Donatello provided the seeds and Pius II the eli mate for the dominating style in the last four decades of the century. The altarpieces commissioned for Pienza Cathedral(see fig. IS, I8) are the first to utilize standard, Renaissance frames-obviously in con formity with the wishes of Pius and his Florentine architect-although only two of the "illustrious Si enese artists," 17 Vecchietta and Matteo di Giovanni, succeeded in rising to the occasion, while Sano di Pietro and Giovanni di Paolo attempted, unsuccessfully, to adapt their flat, Gothic figures to an uncon genial format. In the same way that Pius forced the Sienese government to readmit the nobles to public office, his family and associates sponsored, through their patronage, a new, non-Sienese style. In 1459 18 Pius commissioned a tomb ("of white marble from the Ligurian mountains" ) for his parents in the church of San Francesco. In addition to the epitaph Pius composed, the tomb included bust-length por traits set into shells-as occur on classical sarcophagi. This was followed, in I46o, by a commission for a family loggia. The artist for both projects was Antonio Federighi, who, under Pius's tutelage, trans formed himself from a follower of Jacopo della Quercia into a classicizing sculptor of remarkable inven tiveness. Possibly because of his success with the pope, in I46 5 Federighi was hired by the commune to I8 complete the fourteenth-century chapel on the exterior of the Palazzo Pubblico with a Renaissance .