MARTINI, SIMONE (SIMONE di MARTINO). — Painter, born in Siena, according to Vasari in 1284, died at Avignon in 1344. Together with Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, he is one of the major exponents of that Sienese school which, begun at the end of the thirteenth century by Duccio di Boninsegna, developed, not without mutual influences, alongside the Florentine school of Giotto throughout the fourteenth and a large part of the fifteenth century. He effected the transition from the Romanesque-Byzantine to the Gothic style, already initiated by Duccio, and created a pictorial current which, flowing into France through the work of S. M. himself and of his followers at Avignon, contributed substantially to the formation of that new phase of transalpine painting (known as «International Gothic») which matured in the first decades of the fifteenth century and soon spread to Italy as well.
M.’s documented activity begins with the fresco of the Maestà (Siena, Palazzo pubblico). Painted in 1315, when the painter was, according to the probable Vasarian chronology, already thirty years old, it reveals a fully formed artist capable of competing with the still-living Duccio di Boninsegna, author of the altarpiece of the Maestà of the Cathedral. Although nothing is known of S.’s beginnings, the surviving works clearly indicate that he was trained in Duccio’s circle, from whom he derived not only the compositional scheme and certain typological elements of the Maestà, but above all the value of certain plastic notations that Duccio owed to his classical-Neo-Hellenistic education. The modern attributions concerning M.’s youthful period are based on this conviction: works which either imply, as in the Boston triptych (Museum of Fine Arts, Crucifixion between s. Nicholas and s. Gregory), collaboration with the master (to whom the central part would belong), or display clear influences of his, such as the Redeemer in the Vatican, that in Naples (Pinacoteca), and the Maestà of Massa Marittima (Cathedral), generally attributed to Segna di Bonaventura, a direct follower of Duccio.
From Duccio, S. M. also derived the impulse to observe the modes of French Gothic painting, which had entered Italy through the works of illuminators and glass painters, and he learned from it the elegant linearism that enabled him to overcome the last Byzantine survivals still present in his master. M.’s art sways, gently restlessly, between accents of more rigorous plasticism and more persuasive spatiality, and delicate surface inlays of color. The former
are evident in the Maestà, much more constructed and articulated than Duccio’s analogous composition; the latter appear in the altarpiece of S. Ludovico crowning Roberto d’Angiò (Stories of the Saint in the predella, signed: Naples, Pinacoteca, formerly in S. Lorenzo Maggiore), datable to 1317 and probably executed in Naples, where the Angevin King, precisely in that year, granted the painter a pension, and where he certainly had the opportunity to deepen his knowledge of French Gothic culture, which was widely diffused at that court; and they reappear a few years later, in 1321, in the partial repainting that
A separate mention is merited by the fresco of Guidoriccio da Fogliano (1328, Siena, Palazzo Pubblico): for over the chromatic effect of the whites and blacks standing out on the horse’s caparison and the rider’s garments, there dominates an unlimited sense of space.
For more than a century, historical scholarship has unanimously recognized Simone as the author of the frescoes with the Stories of s. Martin in the chapel dedicated to this Saint in the lower church of S. Francesco at Assisi. Belonging to the period between the Pisan altarpiece and the fresco of the Guidoriccio, the frescoes present once again, with vigor, the plastic elements of the first version of the Maestà, accompanied by equally effective perspectival devices and by a lively study of inhabited interiors and costumes. This was to be the seed, in Sienese art, of a widely diffused current of taste, to which the two Lorenzetti were the first to adhere. The frescoes in the chapel of S. Martin should be joined by: two frescoes with figures of Saints, functioning as altarpieces, also in the lower church; the windows of the chapel of S. Ludovico, whose design most probably belongs to Simone himself, whereas for those of the chapel of S. Martin the intervention of the workshop is generally admitted; the Altomonte triptych (Calabria), recently published by Paccagnini, in which, however, only the central part representing a S. Ladislaus can probably be attributed to Simone; and finally the frontal of the Blessed Agostino Novello (Siena, S. Agostino), which, restored to its original appearance by a successful restoration, is today, after troubled attributional vicissitudes, recognized unanimously, at least in part (the figure of the Saint), as a work by M.
Another summit is reached with the Annunciation of the Uffizi (dated 1333 and bearing, besides Simone’s name, that of Lippo Memmi, to whom the lateral figures of S. Ansono and Giuditta must be attributed; formerly in the Cathedral), which immediately and clearly anticipates the works of the final
period in the sharp breaks of the edge of the mantle, rhythmically accompanying and accentuating the sensitive withdrawal of the Virgin at the angelic announcement.
In 1339 Simone departed for Avignon, where he became friends with Petrarch, for whom he painted a portrait of Laura, and where he most probably remained until his death. The stylistic evolution foreshadowed by the Uffizi altarpiece now became more precise in a quest for dramatic movement and pathetic expression, for which the influence of P. Lorenzetti has often been invoked. The frescoes in the atrium of the cathedral of Avignon having disappeared or been reduced to almost illegible fragments (the S. George Liberating the Princess, of which a description remains, has disappeared; the Madonna and Angels and the Blessing Christ are extremely ruined), these characteristics appear only in the dramatic scenes of the Stefaneschi altarpiece (dispersed among the Museums of Antwerp, Berlin, and the Louvre, signed), in the darting little figures of the Virgilian Allegory in the Ambrosian Codex, the scowling Holy Family in the Liverpool Museum (signed and dated 1342), and in works generally attributed to this period, such as the Stroganoff Annunciate (Leningrad, formerly in Rome), and the Bekoff S. John the Evangelist (Paris): the dreamy enchantment has been broken to give way to a lively and agitated reality, at times sullen and convulsive.
Oltre i citati, vanno sotto il nome di Simone i seguenti dipinti: Altenburg, Museo Lindenau, S. Giovanni Battista; Avignone, Museo Calvet, due frammenti di un affresco che rappresentava forse un'Annunciazione; Bruxelles, Collezione Stoclet, Cristo benedicente, Madonna Annunciata; Cambridge, Museo Fitzwilliam, S. Michele tra s. Ambrogio e s. Agostino (trittico); Cambridge (USA), Museo Fogg, Crocifisso; Nuova York, Metropolitan Museum (già a Roma, coll. Sterbini), S. Giovanni Evangelista; Orvieto, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo (già in S. Francesco), Madonna con il Bambino (parte centrale di politico alla quale, secondo il Toesca, va unito il pannello Liechtenstein con la S. Caterina); Roma, Museo di Palazzo Venezia, Madonna e Bambino (per lo più assegnata a Lippo Memmi); S. Casciano, chiesa della Misericordia, Crocifisso; Firenze, Settignano, collezione Berenson, S. Lucia, S. Mad-
Madalena (pannelli di politico); Siena, Pinacoteca, n. 36, Crocifisso; Siena, Palazzo pubblico, Croce dipinta; Venezia, collezione privata, Redentore (cuspide di politico); Vienna, collezione Liechtenstein, S. Caterina. - Vedi tav. XVII.