In 1311 a huge altarpiece was commissioned from the local Sienese artist, Duccio di Buoninsegna, to adorn the high altar of Siena’s great cathedral. Originally located beneath the dome in the crossing, Duccio’s monumental double-sided polyptych, exceptional in the number and the variety of its panels, and rising perhaps twenty feet above the nave (Conrad 2016: 184), must have stood out dramatically against the black and white marble that still dominates much of the cathedral interior. It would have been an explosion of colour and light.

The entire front of the predella—the horizontal box-like support to the main tier of the altarpiece—was painted with episodes in Jesus’s birth and early childhood, and this exquisite depiction of Luke’s Presentation story occupied the predella’s central position. In the large panel directly above it, the artist installed an immense representation of the Virgin Mary enthroned in glory and surrounded by a vast cloud of witnesses—the famous Maestà—hovering still and glowing like a massive Byzantine icon. 

Small as it is in contrast with the massive Maestà, the Presentation panel at the centre of the predella was not placed there by accident. In contrast with the imperial image soaring above it, the scale and mood of this painting is intimate, personal. A frightened child reaches back to his mother, her hands still outstretched as if ready to take him back. Behind them stands an altar under a marble baldachin, the stonework of its Romanesque arch painted in alternating colours. The pattern recalls the decoration of Siena cathedral itself, but a joyful red has transformed the official Sienese black and white. 

Between the monumental and the intimate, the hieratic and the emotive, these contrasts echo the theological doubleness at the heart of Luke’s account, balancing the joy of Simeon’s song of deliverance (‘For my eyes have seen your salvation’) with the dark warning pronounced just a few verses later. ‘This child is destined for the rising and falling of many’, Simeon will say to Mary, ‘and a sword will pierce your own soul too’ (Luke 2:34–35). No wonder the child—‘a sign that will be opposed’—seeks the arms of his mother, against the sobering backdrop of that glowing altar of sacrifice (Luke 2:33, 35).

References

Conrad, Jessamyn. 2016. ‘The Meanings of Duccio’s Maestà: Architecture, Painting, Politics, and the Construction of Narrative Time in the Trecento Altarpieces for Siena Cathedral’, PhD Dissertation, Columbia University