Madonna and Child

Description: 

Barna da Siena (Italian painter, active ca. 1330-1350)

Madonna and Child

Italian, ca. 1340-1360

Early Renaissance

tempera on wood panel
height 71.9 cm 
width 41.9 cm

Portland Art Museum European Collection, 61.35
Gift of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation

 

Heather McCambly, Medieval Portland Capstone Student, 2008

In the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum, there is a 28-3/8 x 16-1/2-inch half-length Madonna and Child circa 1350 attributed to Barna da Siena, an Italian artist the museum plaque designates as active in the mid-fourteenth century. This artist is said to have worked closely with Lippo Memmi, had a style in the tradition of Simone Martini, and similar to the Master of the Straus Madonna.[1] This work painted in egg tempera on a wood panel, as is typical for the age and region, is embellished with gold leaf with punched haloes and borders. This piece was donated in 1961 by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation in a considerable collection of 30 paintings and two sculptures ranging from Medieval to early Modern works. This study will try to go beyond the information offered at the museum to expose the complexity behind the artist to whom this piece is attributed, as well as the entire mid-century era of Sienese art that has both been dismissed and heavily debated throughout the course of art history.

The figures on this panel have a unique mix of stylized features, naturalistic modeling, and emotional intensity. Barna was known to have utilized a contrast between the naturalistic characteristics and otherworldly qualities such as the gold background and intense stare of the Virgin to inspire religious devotion.[2] The Madonna is dressed in a robe of deep blue over a rich red garment, the robe is ornamented with two visible stars, one on the left shoulder and one on the crown of her head, a standard convention in many Sienese images. She stares out at the viewer with a direct, intense, and mournful gaze, and makes a sign of blessing with two fingers of her right hand. Her features, including her fingers and nose, are elongated and delicate with a small mouth and large eyes, all characteristic of fourteenth-century Sienese panel paintings in the tradition of Simone Martini.[3] The child, both arms wrapped around his mother’s neck gazes affectionately at her and wears a salmon-colored garment under a red robe with gold ornament on the sleeves and collar. Christ still appears to be more like a small man than a baby, another quality that places this in the Early Renaissance period. The intense and contrasting colors also fall in the traditions of fourteenth-century Siena.[4]

The overlapping haloes of the mother and child are created with punches pressed into the gold leaf, a practice that could help to establish the provenance of this work.[5]  In fact, scholar Erling Skaug has firmly attributed at least one of these stamps to the Martini-Memmi workshop.[6] The Madonna's halo consists of a floral pattern, while the Christ child's is bisected by two chevrons that border a cross-shaped stamp. The panel is a vertical rectangle with a peak inset from the main panel indicating it could have been intended as the center of a triptych altarpiece. The wooden frame around the panel has a faded gold floral pattern matched to the pattern of the stamping. The file for this piece indicates the frame could original, and is at the very least antique without any records of reframing. The size of this piece, with a height much more than half its diameter, supports its identification as a work of Barna, as do the plastic treatment of drapery and the repressed emotionalism of the features.[7]

The second half of the trecento saw the sudden death of most of the great artists due to the Black Death, as well as considerable economic impact and governmental reorganization, the combination of which scholars recognize as the reason for the more conservative style.[8] The era of Barna da Siena has frequently been treated as marginal or deficient by scholars for its transitional, subdued, and conservative style in comparison to the works of earlier masters such as the Lorenzetti brothers, Simone Martini, or Duccio.[9] Until the publication of Painting of Florence and Siena after the Black Death by Millard Meiss in 1951, this entire era had been largely categorized as inferior when compared with the innovations of earlier artists. Meiss contended that it was not an issue of lower quality, but a reactionary shift to the religious, economic, civic, and emotional impact of the Black Death that returned painting to a more conservative style.[10] Meiss's interpretation, although well received for decades, has most recently been challenged in the work of Judith Steinhoff, following the refutations of other scholars. Although Steinhoff agrees that a stylistic shift exists in the work after the Black Death, she sees it as an intentional change used as a vehicle for ideas due to the altered art market, new civic and religious needs, and a need for reestablishing a stylistic tradition.[11] Steinhoff also cites this era as one of a diverse, pluralistic, and synthetic style that intentionally incorporated both old and new, while Meiss and others categorize it more monotonously.[12]

In general, the first fifty years of the trecento is viewed as a golden age for Sienese painting, by its end Siena had fallen as an artistic center, leaving Barna as one of the last notable painters in a century that began with prodigious talent.[13] In the work of Meiss, and most of the following books and literature on Sienese painting after the Black Death, the art is discussed in terms of its lack of innovation. However, in each case one exception is made: Barna da Siena. Meiss actually devotes an entire section of his early chapters to Barna alone.[14] Barna is seen as a singular remnant of a dying breed of innovative Sienese painters among a generation of less qualified, less imaginative personalities. This painting exemplifies some of the most praised characteristics of Barna’s work such as the intense emotion, rich color, naturalism, and his references to Duccio. Yet, we also see that he fits in with the late trecento trends, when compared with Madonna and Child pairs painted by Martini or Ambrogio Lorenzetti it is clear that the naturalism seen as revolutionary in early-trecento Siena has faded.

After considering the physical aspects of the piece, its origin, context, and legacy of its painter, we must finally explore the issue of Barna’s identity when attempting to contextualize this panel painting. Significant evidence refuting the existence of an artist named Barna working in Siena in the fourteenth century has been put forth by Peleo Bacci in 1927 and strengthened by Gordon Moran in 1976.[15] Bacci and Moran found that the general agreement on the existence of an artist named Barna has come from the writings of Ghiberti and Vasari working in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Once investigated, it becomes clear that Vasari was working from a copy of Ghiberti’s work that could have either been transcribed incorrectly, or mistaken altogether. To make the issue more confusing, Vasari then changed the Ghiberti's record further, from one fresco to another in the San Gimignano and used the name "Berna" instead of "Barna."[16] Aside from these two writers there is little evidence and no works signed by Barna to be sure that he ever existed, and many of the dates or attributions available contradict and confuse one another.(17) In fact, in 1986 Gaudenz Freuler struck at the last remnant of the Barna identity by firmly attributing the New Testament fresco in San Gimignano, from whence the name Barna originated, to Lippo Memmi.(18)

This is an extremely brief version of the many details of the "Barna Problem," yet the formidable evidence against his existence seems, at times, to be ignored by scholars. Meiss, publishing nearly a decade after the arguments first appeared, completely neglected to mention the shadow over Barna’s legacy.[19] While others such as John Pope-Hennessy acknowledge the problem that Barna’s existence has been based solely on poor "circumstantial evidence," [20] they continue to use the name Barna without refuting the arguments of opposing scholars, a trend continued in scholarship of recent decades.[21] On the other hand, when Steinhoff mentions Barna, an artist praised profusely by her predecessor Meiss, she inserts the name in quotation marks and cites the article by Freuler.[22] In a text solely on the era after the Sienese Black Death, this seems to indicate that the issue of Barna’s existence has already been disproven. While other recent scholarship more forthrightly deals with the mistaken attributions and clearly review the Barna problem for the reader.[23] The inconsistency of the use of this name seems to stem from the fact that although the majority of scholars now agree that Barna never existed, many have clung to the use of this name to categorize a body of work by an unidentified artist or artists that work in the Martini-Memmi tradition.[24]

The Madonna and Child panel painting in the Portland Art Museum, with its strange contrast of naturalism and abstraction and its controversial era of production and artist identity, is essentially unlike art as we view it today. For all of its beauty, rich color, emotional tension, and naturalistic details, this was fundamentally a holy object intimately connected with religious devotion and was viewed with a kind of awe that in current culture is hard to recapture.[25] Once attributed to Barna, this beautiful work gives Portland viewers an opportunity to consider an era of art history that historians have found puzzling, unique and controversial. But even more important to local research, this piece invites scholars to invest the time to situate it more precisely in the post-Black Death era.

Notes
[1] Joseph Polzer, "'The Master of the Rebel Angels' Reconsidered." The Art Bulletin (63.4 1981), 583.
[2] Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena (Princeton: Princeton UP), 1953.
[3] Bruce Cole, Sienese Painting (New York: Harper Row, 1938), 187.
[4] Ibid, 209.
[5] See Erling S. Skaug, Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico (Oslo: Nordic Group, 1994).
[6] Ibid., Table 7.2 figure 438.
[7] John Pope-Hennessy, "Barna, the Pseudo-Barna and Giovanni d'Asciano." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs (88.515 1946), 36.
[8] Fasion,"Barna and Bartolo Di Fredi." The Art Bulletin (14.4 1932), 285.
[9] Judith B. Steinhoff, Sienese Painting After the Black Death (New York: Cambridge UP, 2007), 7.
[10] Steinhoff, 7.
[11] Ibid, 215.
[12] Ibid, 218.
[13] Cole, ix.
[14] Meiss, 35.
[15] Gordan Moran, "Is the Name Barna an Incorrect Translation of Bartolo?" Paragone (37.1 1976), 77.
[16] Ibid, 78.
[17] Margaret Salinger, "An Early Sienese Panel in the Griggs Collection." The Metropolitan of Art Bulletin (2.6 1944), 181.
[18] Gaudenz, Freuler, "Lippo Memmi's New Testament Cylce in the Collegiata of the Gimignano, " Arte Cristiana (1986b): 100.
[19] Meiss, 54.
[20] Pope-Hennessy, 35.
[21] One example is P. Harpring's The Sienese Trecento Painter Bartolo di Fredi (London, Associated UP, 1993) pages 17, 18, 24.
[22] Steinhoff, 21.
[23] Giuletta C. Dini, Allessandro Angelini and Bernardina Sani. Sienese Painting from Duccio to the Birth of the Baroque. (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998), 106.
[24] Ibid., 109.
[25] Robert Ousterhout and Lesile Brubaker, eds. The Sacred Image East and West. (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 3.

Bibliography & Further Reading:

Cole, Bruce. Sienese Painting. New York: Harper Row: 1983.

Dini, Giulette C., Alessandro Angelini and Bardadine Sani. Sienese Painting From Duccio to the Birth of Baroque. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998.

Faison, S.L. "Barna and Bartolo Di Fredi." The Art Bulletin 14.4 (1932): 285-315.

Frueler, Gaudenz. "Lippo Memmi's New Testament Cycle in the Collegiata of San Gimignano." Arte Cristiana B (1986): 93-102.

Frinta, Moirmir. "An Investigation of the Punched Decoration of the Mediaeval Italian and Non-Italian Panel Paintings." The Art Bulletin 47 (1965): 256-265.

Norman, Diana. Painting in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena, 1250-1555. New Haven: Yale UP, 2003.

Maginnis, Hayden, "The Literature of Sienese Trecento Painting 1945-1975." Zietschrift für Kunstgeschichte (1977): 276-309.

Meiss, Millard. Painting In Florence and Siena. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1951.

Moran, Gordan. "Is the Name Barna an Incorrect Transcription of Bartolo?" Paragone 37. 1 (1976): 76-80.

Ousterhout, Robert and Leslie Brubaker, eds. The Sacred Image East and West. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995.

Polzer, Joseph. "'The Master of the Rebel Angels' Reconsidered.'" The Art Bulletin 63.4 (1981): 563.

Pope Hennessy, John. "Barna, the Pseudo-Barna and Giovanni d'Asciano." The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs. 88.515 (1946): 35-37.

Salinger, Margaret. "An Early Sienese Panel in the Griggs Collection." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 2.6 (1944): 181-183.

Skaug, Erling S. Punch Marks from Giotto to Fra Angelico. Oslo: Nordic Group: 1994.

Steinhoff, Judith B. Sienese Painting After the Black Death. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.

Strehlke, Carl. "Sienese Painting in the Johson Collection." Paragone 36 (1985): 3-15.

Ventroni, Delgou. Barna di Siena, Pisa: Giardini, 1972.