Events Exhibitions

Sassetta And His Time. A Look At Early 15th-Century Sienese Art.

Massa Marittima, Museum of San Pietro all'Orto March 15-July 14, 2024

14 August 20241.5k Views

Every artist dips his brush in his own soul, and paints his own nature into his pictures. Henry Ward Beecher

Exhibition curated by Alessandro Bagnoli
In Massa Marittima, exhibition on Sassetta, original interpreter of Sienese painting between Gothic and Renaissance.
Also on display is an unpublished, discovered under a 17th-century repainting.
After Ambrogio Lorenzetti, the Museum of San Pietro all’Orto, in Massa Marittima, offers another major appointment with Sienese art. The protagonist of the exhibition, from March 15 to September 15, will be Stefano di Giovanni, better known as Sassetta (active in Siena from 1423 to 1450), the artist who injected the ferments of the Renaissance into the great fourteenth-century Sienese tradition.
The exhibition, curated by Alessandro Bagnoli, is promoted by the Municipality of Massa Marittima, under the patronage of the Region of Tuscany, in collaboration with the Archdiocese of Siena-Colle Val d’Elsa-Montalcino, the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Siena, the Diocese of Massa Marittima-Piombino, the National Picture Gallery of Siena, and the Soprintendenza Archeologica, Belle Arti e Paesaggio for the Provinces of Siena, Grosseto and Arezzo. A regional and national art bonus campaign was also launched by the municipality, which has garnered interest and in some cases already endorsements from companies and Foundations.

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As was the case with the exhibition event on Lorenzetti, this exhibition takes its cue from a work on permanent display at the Museo di San Pietro all’Orto: Sassetta’s Archangel Gabriel, a small panel once placed between the cusps of an altarpiece. The Virgin Annunciate, the protagonist of the same altarpiece, was unable to return, albeit temporarily to find her Announcing Angel, as she is now the property of the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.
Accompanying the Angel will be about fifty works of which twenty-six are by the Sienese master, the others belong to artists active in the same context in those years. They include the ‘Maestro dell’Osservanza,’ Sano di Pietro, Giovanni di Paolo, Pietro Giovanni Ambrosi and Domenico di Niccolò dei Cori.

The exhibition presents, among the many works by Sassetta granted by national museums and institutions, a very important “first,” which was discovered by the exhibition curator. Only the fine eye of a talented art historian like that of Alessandro Bagnoli could recognize under heavy repainting a masterpiece by Sassetta, which Barbara Schleicher’s excellent restoration has restored to full legibility. It is a Madonna and Child, from the parish church of San Giovanni Battista in Molli (Sovicille) but originally made for a Sienese church, probably San Francesco. This work of extraordinary beauty and delicacy is juxtaposed with a further Madonna and Child, from the Museo dell’Opera in Siena and recently restored by the FAI, to which is added the peculiar Madonna of the Cherries, from the Museum of Grosseto, so called because of the presence of these unusual fruits in the Virgin’s hand. From Siena’s Pinacoteca Nazionale arrive on view the Four Protectors of Siena, the Four Doctors of the Church, the marvelous panel of St. Anthony clubbed by devils, and the Last Supper, all fragments of the very famous altarpiece commissioned in Sassetta by the Arte della lana, for which a new and more convincing reconstruction is proposed in the exhibition. While a Saint Anthony Abbot comes from the Monte dei Paschi Bank Collection.

Stefano di Giovanni known as Sassetta was undoubtedly the most important and original Sienese painter of the first half of the fifteenth century. He died in 1450 at the height of his activity, leaving the “unfortunate widow with three poor pupils who the eldest is seven years old, et Idio sa sa in what state.”

The exhibition will be open from March 15 to June 30 from Tuesday to Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. \ 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. and from Sept. 1 to 15 daily 9:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. \ 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.