Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana di Siena

An altarpiece made for a cathedral, not a gallery, has not entirely left home. The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo keeps Duccio di Buoninsegna's Maestà — painted for the high altar of Siena Cathedral between 1308 and 1311 — inside the first bays of the unfinished New Cathedral, a few steps from the church it once served.

Why it matters

Duccio's double-sided altarpiece changed the course of Sienese painting: more than forty figures crowd the front panel around the Virgin enthroned, and on the back nearly eighty scenes compressed into twenty-six panels recount the Passion of Christ. The museum displays it in a climate-controlled room on the first floor. Around it, the museum gathers the cathedral's displaced treasures: marble figures that once stood on its facades, the round stained-glass window that Duccio designed for the cathedral's oculus between 1287 and 1290, and a treasury assembled under Renaissance popes.

What to notice

The Maestà's narrative reverse contains nearly eighty scenes arranged in twenty-six panels. The museum also preserves marble statues of sibyls, prophets and philosophers carved by Giovanni Pisano during his years directing the Opera, from 1284 to 1297. They stood on the cathedral facade until replacements were installed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Among them hangs Donatello's tondo known as the Madonna del Perdono, dated around 1458, alongside Jacopo della Quercia's marble relief of the Madonna with Cardinal Casini from 1437–1438 and his group of wooden Madonnas and saints from 1415–1420. Pietro Lorenzetti's Birth of the Virgin, painted in 1342, and the thirteenth-century Madonna of the Large Eyes by the Maestro di Tressa complete the picture. In the treasury, more than two hundred liturgical pieces include the reliquary of the arm of Saint John the Baptist made by Francesco d'Antonio in 1466 for Pius II and the Golden Rose designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, presented by Pope Alexander VII in 1658.

Context and history

The museum's building explains its strangeness. In 1339 the republic resolved to enlarge the cathedral on a scale that would make the city's ambition permanent; the New Cathedral's bays rose along the side of the existing nave until the plague of 1348 stopped the work for good. The museum, founded in 1869 and counted among the oldest private museums in Italy, occupies the first three bays of that abandoned structure, its bricked-up arcades facing the cathedral. The unfinished New Cathedral also includes the Facciatone, a monumental surviving section of its planned facade. Duccio's round window, about six metres across, shows the Burial, Assumption and Coronation of the Virgin between Siena's four patron saints.