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| Ambrogio Lorenzetti |
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| Painter |
| Siena, informatio from 1319 to 1347 |
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The first dated work by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, younger brother of Pietro
Lorenzetti, both painters from Siena, is the Madonna and Child painted
for the Church of Vico l'Abate in 1319 and now contained in the Museum
of Religious Art of San Casciano Val di Pesa. This painting on wood,
which shows clear influences of Florentine art, suggests that, at least
in this period, the painter was working in Florence, where he must also
have lived for a while, very probably early in his career, as he was
registered with the Guild of Doctors and Chemists in 1327.
Ambrogio
painted a polyptych, today divided up, for the Florentine Church of San
Procolo in 1332, of which a triptych and two paintings on wood with
four Stories from the life of St. Nicholas are now in the Uffizi
Gallery. Here he definitely confirms his own personal style, built around a
reinterpretation of the colour, lines and play of space used in
traditional Sienese painting. His so-called Madonna of Milk, now in the
Archiepiscopal Seminary in Siena, dates from the same period and is one
of his most famous works because of the intimate relationship between
the Holy Mother and her Child. According to documents, in 1334 he was working at Montesiepi (Siena),
where he carried out several frescoes, among them a Madonna enthroned
and a Child with Saints.
A reliable source of information on Ambrogio's
artistic production can be found in the second book of Commentaries by
Lorenzo Ghiberti (who pieced together the biographies of 14th century
artists), which mentions the great Sienese cycles in the cloisters of
San Francesco and in the Capitulary Church of Sant'Agostino (only
partially conserved), as well as the frescoes carried out with his
brother Pietro for the Spedale of Santa Maria della Scala in 1335.
His return to Siena marked the more mature stage in his independent and
extremely original artistic style. It reveals itself in the great cycle
of frescoes of the Allegories of the Good and Bad Government, painted
in the Hall of the Nine in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena between 1337
and 1339. This is perhaps the most important example of Gothic civic
painting, as well as being the first time that a view of the city and
surrounding countryside were to be reproduced on such a large scale and
to reflect reality so closely. Still in the Palazzo Pubblico, Ambrogio also painted a Map of the World
(now lost), an imposing rotating map of Sienese dominions on a wall of
the room next door to the Hall of the Nine. The two paintings on wood -
A city near the sea and A castle on the banks of a lake - other
examples of landscape painting considered to be the oldest in art
history and now in the National Picture Gallery of Siena, were carried
out in the same period.
The painter's last works, important for his study in the use of
perspective, include the Presentation in the Temple of 1342 (Uffizi
Gallery, Florence) and the Annunciation of 1344 (National Picture
Gallery, Siena). Here the artist persists in his attempt to create a
spatial unity, trying to overcome the mediaeval concept of the
polyptych and follow his insight and, although the paintings show a
basic weakness, because he was as yet unable to obtain a complete and
rational control of the space, they are already a future revelation of
the theories of the Renaissance.
The Annunciation is the artist's last known work. Nothing more is heard
of him after 1347 and he presumably died like his brother Pietro during
the plague of 1348.
Attracted, at least in his youth, by the many figurative experiences on
which Tuscan artistic culture was based, a careful observer of everyday
life and interested in portraying nature and the landscape, Ambrogio
Lorenzetti progressed from the gracious Gothic style of Simone Martini
to the spatial conquests of Florentine art and thus took 14th century
Sienese painting to its greatest heights
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