Tea at Trianon: Taddeo di Bartolo: Sienese Gothic in the Early Renaissance

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, August 4, 2026

Taddeo di Bartolo: Sienese Gothic in the Early Renaissance

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

If I hadn’t told you the date, would you have guessed the early fifteenth century?
Most people wouldn’t, and would probably peg it as “early Renaissance”. In fact, even readers who’ve been following the Sacred Images Project for a while might hesitate. At first glance, this looks like a classic mid-14th century, “Trecento” Sienese Gothic Madonna. It has all the notes: a glowing gold background functioning as non-natural space, meticulously and elaborately tooled and stamped to show the haloes, the richly patterned cloth created by picking out the paint with the sgraffito technique to expose the gold underlay.
Here are the typical Sienese gentle almond eyes, elongated figures, softly rounded and luminous features, and the solemn little Christ Child, royally dressed, blessing the viewer. It all belongs to a visual language that seems to have come straight from the age of Duccio and Simone Martini.
But this isn’t 1340. It was painted around 1405, sixty-five years later. What makes it so intriguing is that the great flowering of the Sienese “golden age,” so characterised by this very distinctive painting style, was supposed to have ended quite abruptly in 1348, with the Black Death that wiped out 50% of Siena’s population in a single year. But we will see below that this is an oversimplification. Since there’s no documentation it’s only speculation, but wouldn’t it be fun to think of him as saying, “We’re Sienese, dammit, whatever those heathen Florentines are doing”? What if Siena wasn’t behind Florence but simply disagreed with Florence? (Read more.)