33. Duccio di Buoninsegna. Maestà, ca. 1290. Gold and tempera on wood, 123/8 x 91/8 in. (31.5 x 23.2 cm). Kunstmuseum, Bern (GO873)
(opposite) 34. Duccio di Buoninsegna. Madonna and Child (center panel from a polyptych), ca. 1304(?). Gold and tempera on wood, 375/8 x 251/8 in. (95.5 x 63.8 cm). Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia (29)
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that we shall scarcely find its like.” To his mind only Raphael, two centuries later, could rival Duccio in this area. Berenson then went on to contrast Duccio’s gifts with Giotto’s emphasis on purely formal values, which he felt led ultimately to the work of Michelangelo. Berenson saw Duccio as “a pictorial dramatist, as a Christian Sophocles,” and Giotto as the master of “form and movement — the two most essential elements in the figure arts.” Laying aside Berenson’s somewhat dated aesthetic categories, we might prefer to think of Duccio, with his supreme sense of color and design, as the Matisse of the fourteenth century, but a Matisse who thought of the spiritual almost exclusively in terms of Christian narrative. Together, Duccio and Giotto provided the foundation on which generations of trecento artists built, and it is impossible to do justice to the art of their successors without reference to both. Between 1285 – 87, when he painted the Ruccellai Madonna, and 1308 – 11, when the Maestà was created, Duccio’s art underwent an enormous transformation. No documented paintings fill the gap between those two enormous paintings — the two most important by Duccio to have survived — but a number of small or modestly scaled devotional pictures and the remains of one altarpiece are usually seen as signposts pointing toward the achievement of the Maestà. Much the earliest is a ravishing little panel in Bern showing the Madonna and Child enthroned (fig. 33) that was perhaps painted about 1290. In that painting the wood throne of the Ruccellai Madonna has already been exchanged for a marble one with real architectural presence, and the Child moves freely across the Virgin’s lap. (The way his cheek is pressed against his mother’s can be traced to a miraculous Byzantine icon, but the motif was well known in Tuscany and relates to the notion of Christ as the bridegroom of the Virgin/Church.) Although the angels are still stacked up at the sides, their sidelong glances create a new interplay. For the Church of San Domenico in Perugia, a short distance from Assisi, Duccio painted a now damaged but very beautiful panel (fig. 34) that was once the centerpiece