Nick’s note: added 2004 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art permanent collection.
Madonna and Child (c. 1300)
Duccio di Buoninsegna (active by 1278, died 1318)The small painting made news in 2004, when the Met bought it for a sum in the $45–$50 million range. But the museum needed a work to serve as the beginning of its story about Western art history, and this devotional piece, created by the founder of the Sienese school of painting, does so magnificently. The Old Master tradition emerged in Italy, which means it sprouted from the soil of Byzantine art, a legacy of the Eastern Roman Empire. And this painting is loaded with Byzantine tropes: the heavily stylized figuration (especially the way the baby Jesus looks more like a balding middle-aged man than a child) and the gold-leaf background symbolizing the sacred, inviolate space of heaven. But what’s important are the touches that break with that style, and take the first steps toward the humanistic vision that would define the Renaissance. There is, for one thing, the palpable emotional exchange between mother and child: The tender trading of glances, the infant Christ pushing back Mary’s cowl to get a better look at her. Then there is the parapet running along the bottom, rendered in an illusionistic perspective that while crude, still pulls you through the picture plane. This work, then, is no longer an abstract symbol of the divine, but rather an attempt to connect its theme to the real-world experience of the viewer. SOURCE - TIME OUT NEW YORK
