Lorenzetti, Pietro

(c. 1290-1348)

   Italian painter who, along with his brother Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Simone Martini, dominated the art scene in Siena. Pietro's Virgin and Child with Saints, Annunciation, and Assumption, the polyptych he created for the Pieve di Santa Maria in Arezzo, is signed and dated 1320 in an accompanying inscription where he declares himself to be a mature artist, in complete control of the new style of painting. This new style to which he refers is the naturalism Giotto introduced in the early years of the 14th century. In this altarpiece, the Virgin wears a mantle lined with ermine fur, rather than the customary red and blue cloak, and she and the Christ Child are no longer enthroned as in earlier altarpieces, but rather they stand in front of a gilded background. The Christ Child, normally shown in a blessing gesture, here interacts with his mother. While the volume of the figures and draperies depend on Giotto's art, the emphasis on luxurious costumes, brilliant colors, and heavy gilding, are characteristics particular to the Sienese School of painting.

   In 1325-1330, Pietro was in Assisi, painting frescoes of the Passion of Christ in the transept of the Lower Church of San Francesco. Of these, the Crucifixion is the most poignant. Though Pietro followed Byzantine and 13th-century representations of the scene, his version is filled with a pathos not found in earlier examples — a convincing representation of a tragic event. Pietro's most famous work is the Birth of the Virgin (Siena, Museo dell' Opera del Duomo), painted in 1342 for the Cathedral of Siena,a truly innovative altarpiece in that the frame becomes an outward projection of the painted architecture. To further enhance the sense of depth, Pietro showed the three four-partite vaults of the upper-class Sienese setting in which the scene takes place and he positioned his figures behind two columns. With this, he foreshadowed the developments of one-point linear perspective that would be introduced in painting and relief sculpture in Italy in the 15th century.