Siena and the Wider World: Reframing the City's Art Through Global Exchanges, 1300 - 1492

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Contributing to further the study of global art history, this research endeavours to bring to the fore Siena's cross-cultural connections and their impact upon the city's art (1300-1492). The scope of my research pre-dates the developments of notions surrounding 'race', European selfhood or superiority - concepts that emerged with the discoveries of the Americas and the establishment of the African slave trade. A crucial aim of this project is therefore geared towards understanding the grounds on which difference was established, if at all. By uncovering how Sienese artists visualised people and objects originating elsewhere, my thesis allows for new interpretative pathways both to renowned artworks and to the Sienese artistic tradition as a whole. This leads me to consider whether transcultural amalgamation directly affected the development of Siena's own artistic identity, questioning the very ontology of a 'home-grown' Sienese Renaissance that originated as an exclusively Western phenomenon. This dissertation is organized chronologically and across three thematic chapters (Patronage; Iconography; Artistic Collaboration). The first chapter is concerned with Siena's understanding of and approach to the 'cultural other' as reflected in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Martyrdom of the Franciscans, commissioned by the Franciscans for their church of San Francesco in Siena (c. 1340). Ambrogio's Martyrdom will lead us to consider alterity from the standpoint of the Order, which during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries endeavoured in numerous missionary activities in Asia, establishing diplomatic contact with Mongol courts. The second chapter considers fifteenth-century visits of Ethiopian delegations to Italy in connection to Sienese representations of African attendees and kings in the iconography for the Adoration of the Magi. The third chapter examines the marble inlay flooring in Siena's Cathedral, focusing on the project's unprecedented artistic collaboration to represent alterity through technique and material - e.g. the Libyan Sybil, depicted with black marble to denote her skin colour.