Libreria Piccolomini

Visitors expect a library to be quiet and grey. Siena's Piccolomini Library is the opposite: a small room on the north side of the cathedral, drenched in colour, whose walls narrate the life of a local boy who became a pope. Pinturicchio and his workshop painted it between 1503 and 1508.

Why it matters

The room was built around 1492 by Cardinal Francesco Todeschini Piccolomini — archbishop of Siena and, briefly, Pope Pius III — to honour the memory of his uncle Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the humanist who reigned as Pius II, and to house the books the pope had collected during his years in Rome. The official operator describes it as inspired by the great library of Sixtus IV in the Vatican and by French cathedral libraries, which makes it a rare Italian monument to a very specific Renaissance idea: that a family's rise deserves a room of painted biography.

What to notice

Ten frescoes run along the walls in chronological order. Four scenes of Aeneas Silvius' youth, from his departure for the Council of Basel to his reconciliation with Pope Eugene IV and his appointment as bishop, fill the long north-east wall; two scenes on the south-east wall follow his career as bishop and cardinal; four on the south-west wall cover his papacy, from his coronation to his arrival at Ancona. The episode everyone pauses at is the fifth: the meeting of Emperor Frederick III with Eleonora of Portugal at the Porta Camollia of Siena on 24 February 1452. In the Canonization of Saint Catherine of Siena, two small figures — one in red stockings, one in a red cap — have long been identified, by tradition rather than documents, as the young Raphael and Pinturicchio himself.

Look up before you leave: the vault carries grotesques with mythological scenes around the cardinal's coat of arms of five crescents. At the centre of the room stands the Three Graces, a Roman copy of a Hellenistic statue that Todeschini bought from Cardinal Prospero Colonna in Rome, and the lit cabinets hold fifteenth-century choir books — Graduals and Antiphonaries — whose finest pages came from the illuminators Liberale da Verona and Girolamo da Cremona, summoned to Siena in the late 1460s.

Context and history

The library sits on the site of the former priests' house against the north flank of the cathedral, and its biography follows its founder's: Todeschini, elected to the papacy in 1503 as Pius III, commissioned the frescoes from the Umbrian painter Bernardino di Betto, known as Pinturicchio. The painted life story draws on the biography by Giovanni Antonio Campano and on Pius II's own Commentarii, the pope's account of his own times. The result is propaganda of a remarkably literary kind — each scene a chapter, each wall a book — and it has kept its colours and its original narrative order intact.