Painting in Florence and Siena

The painting of the third quarter of the century, more religious in a traditional sense, more ecclesiastical, and more akin to the art of an earlier time, may reflect the profound social changes brought about by the plague and the crisis that followed...

More conservative tastes triumphed among the "gente nova" (new rich) who had acquired wealth and influence as patrons... As the most eminent student of Florentine economic history has written: 'Reading the last wills of the members of the Company of the Bardi...there becomes evident and dramatic the contrast between the practical life of these bold and tenacious men, the builders of immense fortunes, and their terror of eternal punishment for having accumulated wealth by rather unscrupulous methods' [Armando Sapori, in Archivio Storico Italiano, III, 1925, p. 250]. ...The loss of exclusive control of the state and the terror of the Black Death seemed further punishments for dubious practices...In the wake of the disasters of the 'forties and 'fifties, then, the established wealthy families of Florence very probably welcomed a less worldly and less humanistic art than that of the earlier years of the century.... All sections of the middle class were... clearly united in their desire for a more intensely religious art.... Masses of people, interpreting the calamities as punishments of their worldliness and their sin, were stirred by repentance and religious yearning... Several painters -- Orcagna, Luca di Tommè, Andrea da Firenze -- were... moved to a greater piety or a mystical rapture. Others who were less deeply stirred saw fit nevertheless, as the craftsmen of images for the cult, to adopt many of the new values and the new artistic forms, though in a more conventional way. For the painting of the time this religious excitement, and the conflict of values which it entailed, was a crucial cultural event.

(M.R.) Adapted from: Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death. The Arts, Religion, and Society in the Mid-Fourteenth Century, Princeton, 1951 (1978), chapter 2, pp. 70-ff.