Art:

...The exquisite character of the panel-the hand of the accomplished miniaturist is here-is only revealed on close inspection of both the created cosmos and the richly detailed garden beside it...

...It shows St...

...Catherine almost floats above the pavement of a Gothic paneled room where Raymond sits at his writer's bench while Christ, surrounded by angels, gently breaks through the architecture in a gesture of benediction and inspiration...

...With few exceptions, the most striking panels in the show are not a great deal larger than the generous color illustrations in the catalogue...

...Its effects, or so it seems to me, are visible in the Met exhibition...

...Giovanni di Paolo also painted scenes from the life of Saint Catherine of Siena, the pride of the city and one of only two women (Teresa of Avila is the other) who bear the title "Doctor of the Church...

...This is lectio divina in tempera...

...One that is particularly striking shows St...

...Siena, after all, was the home of Saint Catherine (died 1380...

...Thus, Sassetta's altarpiece for the Wool Guild (the Arte della Lana), commissioned in 1423, was a tribute to the Blessed Sacrament and its principal feast, Corpus Christi...

...the Jesuati (later suppressed) whose spirituality was the continuing subject of suspicion because of its austerity...

...Saint Anthony is a central figure in Christian ascetic hagiogra-phy, with a literary history that runs from the fourth-century Life by Ajthanasius down to Gustave Flaubert and an artistic tradition that occurs as late as Paul Cezanne and Salvador Dali...

...This is something I have done a good deal, both for the pleasure they afford and for the instruction they grant...

...This small panel (46 x 52 cm...

...and a colony of Augustinian hermits who lived at nearby Leccetto...

...Thus the Master uses an anachronistic setting in order to show both the contemporaneity of the saint and to imply a tribute to a past master of Sienese art...

...Nonetheless, what one does not find is either the naturalism of a Florentine painter like Masaccio (died 1428) or the elaborate allegories of a Botticelli (died 1510)-to name just two Florentine painters who span roughly the same century...

...One will find, to be sure, some classical and/or mythological panels (usually from a large cassone for a private home) just as one can see religious panels that employ advanced techniques of perspective, decoration, architectural setting, and drama that give evidence of a sophistication well beyond the older tradition of Italo-Byzantine styles...

...He lavished the city (and his relatives) with monies to enhance the family name...

...The Met show has some panels from this monumental work, including an exquisite one from the Vatican Museum...

...Such analogies are suspect but if I were to characterize the art of this period I would be inclined to see it as a visual rendering of the tradition of monastic theology rather than that of the theology of the schoolmen...

...The saint appears in the Met exhibition in panels done by the Master of the Osservanza inspired by the Lifeof Athanasius...

...This spiritual matrix, combined with Siena's economic problems and the disastrous aftermath of the 1348 plague, which carried off 60,000 of its 80,000 inhabitants, is part of the background for fifteenth-century Sienese art and its reiterated themes...

...One does not encounter the paintings as such but, as a second-best ploy, one can study the crisp plates in detail...

...The most interesting thing about this show, apart from the intrinsic merit of the works themselves, is that the curators have managed to assemble scattered panels from various museums so that the narratives of some major altarpieces can be seen in the order in which they were first set...

...Giovanni's most extraordinary work (it is in the Met's permanent collection) is of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise...

...Anyone who still has lingering images of the Renaissance as a pagan humanistic rejection of the medieval worldview would do well to take a long hard look at the art of this period...

...Catherine dictating to Raymond of Capua (a Dominican friar who, in life, served both as her amanuensis and biographer...

...Thomas Aquinas in prayer before a crucifix set in a highly detailed architectural setting (we view the saint through an imagined "open" wall...

...The Met show has no less than ten scenes from Catherine's life, all from an altarpiece which has been dispersed for nearly two hundred years...

...God touches this great disk so one sees quickly that the artist has, simultaneouliP given us the scene of creation and the denouement of the Genesis story with the exile of the first parents...

...In that way, the careful viewer is able to see an ensemble rather than single scenes hanging on widely separated museum walls...

...Siena had its renaissance moments, most notably through the efforts of a native son, Enea Silvio Piccolomini who, as Pius II, reigned as pope from 1458 to 1464...

...The Met show focuses on Sienese art between 1420 and 1500...

...In both cities, an extra-cultural event, the calamitous Black Death (1348), proved a watershed event for artistic sensibilities...

...and its intermingling of the inherited mysteries of the faith set in contemporary scenes...

...The Met show will not travel, which is a pity, but the catalogue, with excellent essays by three noted scholars of the period, is sumptuously illustrated (distributedby Harry Abrams, Inc...

...One of the truly fine painters of this period is Giovanni di Paolo (died 1482) who was a master illuminator of books (including Dante's Commedia) and an accomplished narrative painter who worked for various religious orders in Siena...

...ART THE SEERS OF SIENA ARTISTS ANCHORED IN THE SACRED As critic John Russell wrote recently in the New York Times, the exhibition of paintings from Renaissance Siena at the Metropoli-tan Museum of Art in New York City is a nonpareil among recent "blockbuster" art shows...

...A number of these panels are easily viewable in American collections, but my favorite, from the State Museum of Berlin, is of the young Anthony at Mass...

...Anthony of the Desert beset by demons in an open landscape...

...Amore ominous panel of the burning of a heretic, may well echo the execution of John Huss who preached strong views against transubstantiation in Northern Europe...

...the place where San Bernardino (died 1444) preached some of his most ferocious sermons...

...From that same altarpiece there is a surviving scene of St...

...The exhibition (December 20-March 19) and the eponymous catalogue published for the show offer the viewer a visual banquet and, equally, a feast of instruction in both art history and the history of culture, including the religious and devotional aspects of culture...

...They are more like narratives to which we "listen" visually as the Gospel is proclaimed and the great deeds of the saints are recounted...

...and the locale of some important religious foundations: the Benedictines of Monte Oliveto...

...As I paged through the show's lush catalogue (Paintings in Renaissance Siena, Metropolitan Museum of Art, $45) I could not but be struck with the intense religiosity of these paintings and, what is more, the preoccupation with the ascetic life and its deeply affective religiosity...

...Between the swooping figure of God at the upper left of the panel and the departing couple hurried off by the angel on the right, there is a vast brilliant disk which, upon closer examination, appears to be the planetary system (of the zodiac) and a "God's eye" view of our earth in which the tops of mountains and the course of rivers are evident...

...Space forbids full description of these narrative pieces...

...Nonetheless, it was the culture of ascetic religion that most fed the city's artistic impulses...

...and well annotated...

...Some of the lessons are interestingly revisionist...

...It was the sixteenth-century judgment of Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Eminent Painters, a judgment still standard fare in art history books today, that the high point of the true renaissance in Sienese painting belonged to the previous century, with the work of Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers...

...Yet, just as the thirteenth-century painters Cimabue and Giotto were the heralds of the new Florentine art 6f the century after them, so Duccio and company were the forerunners of an artistic tradition that would also flourish in the fifteenth century...

...These paintings are not, strictly speaking, icons, i.e., windows into the world of eternity before which we gaze...

...LAWRENCE S. CUNNINGHAM Lawrence S. Cunningham teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame...

...its echoes of the international Gothic style which still exerted an influence from the North...

...He lived in Tuscany and is an admirer of its art and culture.ts art and culture...

...What struck me most about the art of this show was its sense of the sacred...

...This is an art anchored in the old legends of the saints and the contemplative exegesis of the Scriptures...

...The Master of the Osservanza puts Anthony in a church setting which has been identified as a chapel of the Duomo in Siena (with its characteristic dark and light striations) which, as the catalogue notes, housed Simone Martini's famous Annunciation (now in the Uffizi Museum in Florence) in the fifteenth century...

...gives us the cosmos writ both large and small...