Musical Space in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Massa Marittima Maestà

228 ČLÁNKY ARTICLES UMĚNÍ ART 3–4 LXIV 2016

KAREL THEIN chARLES UNIVERSITY, pRAGUE

Musical Space in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Massa Marittima Maestà

Sensible warnings have been issued against over-interpreting Renaissance altarpieces.1 These warnings are especially appropriate in the context of the early history of this (admittedly somewhat fuzzy) category,2 with its grounding in the artistic and devotional practice of the period. At the same time, since altarpieces are devotional images, even the most scrupulous inquiry into how exactly, and in what setting, the patrons made their commissions — and, indeed, inquiry into the historical context of their instructions — must take into account the pictorial means employed in creating a sort of visionary intimacy between the panel and its viewers. In this respect, many Sienese fourteenth-century altarpieces have been fortunate enough to have been the object of thorough-going historical interpretations. These interpretations, in attending to the circumstances of the commissioning, have not shied away from the more elusive issues of the textual and iconographic sources connected with the preferences of the various religious orders who acted as patrons.

An example of this approach is furnished by Diana Norman’s detailed examination of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maestà, commissioned by the Augustinians in Massa Marittima and executed c.1335–1337.3 [1] Norman’s discussion ranges from the issue of the panel’s original location,4 through the identification of the panel’s protagonists with their attributes, to the delicate, yet intriguing, question of the direct influence of Augustinian theological themes on the elaboration of the altarpiece. While paying attention, in the wake of Rowley, White, Muller or Hibbard, to the presence and mutual arrangement of the three theological virtues,5 Norman submits that Saint Augustine’s views on the Incarnation and the mystery of

the Trinity may have informed some parts of the resulting pictorial scheme. All in all, she credits the painter with having created, in his Maestà, ‘a series of theologically sophisticated iconographic details’.6

Norman presents us with many plausible conjectures in support of her interpretation, and it is not the aim of this article to ultimately corroborate or dispute her claim. I do not intend to discuss in detail the issue of how well versed in theology the trecento painters may have been and how closely the patrons inspected, or indeed guided, their work. Much more modestly, I take for my starting point the indubitable fact that this particular altarpiece is a visual locus where a high level of theoretical sophistication meets popular piety; and if there may be a close connection between iconography and theology, there always persists a certain tension between them. First because the painter deals in a different type of abstraction, second because the themes of popular piety and ‘professional’ theology never entirely coincide. Ultimately, this makes the public devotional painting (much as the sermon, on the level of language) so important: during the liturgy, higher education and private sentiments naturally intersect. It seems clear that, on behalf of patrons such as the Augustinian Hermits, the painting’s visual splendour was tolerated (if not encouraged) precisely as an element of this natural fusion. The narrow definition of a given commission certainly did not then exclude its complex execution, where symbolic and liturgical strictures accommodate the artist’s initiative and his taste for intricacy and, indeed, novelty.

In this respect, the altarpieces of the first half of the fourteenth century were perhaps less codified, at least as far as the descriptions of the commissioned picture are concerned, than those of the two subsequent

UMĚNÍ ART 3–4 LXIV 2016 ČLÁNKY ARTICLES 229

kAREL ThEINMUSIcAL SpAcE IN AMBROGIO LORENZETTI’S MASSA MARITTIMA MAESTÀ

centuries.7 Although the very structure of the altarpiece already invites one to observe the (as yet unformulated and always partly pragmatic) distinction between imagini and storie that informs the patrons’ requirements during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,8 the concrete visual experience, especially when connected to liturgy, makes these categories, in all their technical and pragmatically observed distinctness, mentally permeable with each other. To a variable degree, there is no image without a narrative (at least implied) and no narrative without an image (at least mental). Even in the case of imagini, where contracts stipulate ‘people, not stories’,9 the ‘knowing who’ and ‘knowing what’ are not always or neatly separable. Obviously, one possible measure of the artist’s imaginative intervention is how successfully he suggests one by the other and vice versa.

I do not wish to theorize these relations any further here. Instead, I hope to offer an observation about the Massa Marittima Maestà that fits well with its oft-stressed painterly sophistication as well as its recognized main theme. The aim of this article is to

suggest a duality in the panel’s pictorial composition, namely that the scheme of the Maestà is executed so as to contain a deliberate reference to (or the visible presence of) the Virgin’s Assumption. This duality is different from the one suggested by Norman and other art historians, whereby ‘Ambrogio’s representation of the principal iconic figures of the Madonna and Christ Child emphasizes Mary’s dual role as both mother and queen of heaven.’10

To suggest a narrative complementarity of the Maestà and the Assunta should be uncontroversial as far as the image of the Virgin in Glory implies (indeed builds upon) her unique story and derives its devotional function from the viewer’s knowledge of the latter. At the same time, such an observation calls for further justification. Which is why this article will also discuss the two following points: first, the possible influence of Ambrogio’s picture on a number of subsequent Assumptions from the second half of the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries; and second, the difficult question of the painter’s motivation for presenting us with an unusual iconographic synthesis.

1 / Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maestà, c. 1335tempera and gold, wood, 161 × 209 cmMassa Marittima, Palazzo ComunalePhoto: © 2016 Photo Scala, Florence


Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Massa Marittima Maestà has been long appreciated for its pictorial qualities. Whereas both Ghiberti and Vasari mention this panel without any further detail, recent literature ventures to describe the richness and complexity of its composition. Starting probably with F. M. Perkins’ article on ‘the forgotten masterpiece of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, all of these descriptions explicitly assume that the Virgin sits on a sculpted or carved throne, although no such structure is actually visible.11 There seems to be a consensus that the throne is simply hidden under the Virgin’s mantel and behind the wings of two angels that closely flank her, upholding the cushion she sits on. At the same time, in most cases, what starts as a simple description tends to reveal an uncertainty about where to draw the line between what is visible and what we, as viewers, project onto (or rather beyond) the painted surface.

Thus, in his 1958 monograph on the artist, Rowley explains how ‘Ambrogio describes physical depth by the throne, but implies spatial magnitude by multiple haloes, by receding orthogonals of golden nimbi, and by the enfolding angel wings. If we replace these enfolding wings with a solid rectangular throne we should instantly realize that they subtly suggest an indefinite space beyond the Madonna.’12

Here the ‘if ’ and ‘we should’ prescribe a mental and theoretical operation that is already a step away from what we are actually perceiving.

In a similar vein, Timothy Hyman seems to affirm the presence of the throne in its very disappearance: ‘The Virgin’s throne has entirely disappeared, as though she is being kept aloft only by the pressure of massed haloes, over a hundred of which can be counted.’13 More straightforwardly, Chiara Frugoni states that ‘the Virgin sits on a throne atop three steps, each one painted the same colour as the Theological Virtues seated on it.’ Still she adds that ‘six musical angels [sic!] carrying thuribles kneel at the foot of the throne, around which are crowded four angels, two of whom uphold the Virgin’s cushion and form the cusps of the throne with their wings (just like in the Maestà of Sant’Agostino), and two are casting flowers over the Madonna and the Child.’14 The reference to the Sant’Agostino Maestà is important yet somewhat self-defeating since in the latter it is much clearer that the wings of seraphim replace the throne in the sense of an independently depicted (or indeed depictable) structure.15

Thus we come closest to the likely truth: the throne is not occluded but intentionally suggested in a playful illusionistic mode. The function of the throne

2 / Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maestà, c. 1335 (detail)tempera and gold, wood, 161 × 209 cmMassa Marittima, Palazzo ComunalePhoto: © 2016 Photo Scala, Florence



is transferred to the non-material angelic presence (the protective wings), which plays on our imagination and leads our mind to conjure up the throne in the usual representational mode. The throne is therefore not simply absent as it is in some seated Madonnas from the third quarter of the fourteenth century.16 Rather, its imaginary presence becomes part of the overall composition whose suggestion of an ascending motion begins with the three steps whereupon three theological virtues are arranged. However, the illusionistic quality of the ‘throne’ above the steps makes it unnecessary to suppose that, literally, ‘the throne of the Madonna rests upon the broad base of Fides, while the second and third steps symbolise Spes and Charitas, respectively.’17 This is an accurate description as far as the theological virtues are concerned. The steps, however, do not only form the base of a suggested throne; they also exemplify the internal hierarchy of the theological virtues, with Faith as the foundation and Charity as the peak. Between them, Hope holds a tall tower which subtly reinforces the illusion of an architectural setting.18

We find a similar triangular constellation in the Buon governo fresco where Faith, Hope and Charity are placed directly above the most prominent figure of the central wall.19 In our case, they sit below the Virgin, thus reinforcing the impression of her being far above the earthly realm (only the lower border of the mantel rests on the step of Charity). Emphasizing this impression, Rowley refers the whole composition to Dante’s Commedia (in particular to Dante’s vision of Beatrice in the earthly paradise). The same reference is given by Frugoni who, in the wake of Norman, also describes the Virgin as both mother and queen of heaven.20 Sharon Dale, championing a connection between the painting’s programme and Augustinian theology, speaks about ‘the enthroned Madonna’ or ‘the Virgin’s throne’, and concludes on ‘the pictorial transformation of the Madonna in Majesty into a personification of Heavenly Jerusalem.’21

While this last observation is not entirely unfounded, it is perhaps more appropriate to conclude that the absence of a sculpted throne indicated Ambrogio’s visual transformation of the Virgin herself into the throne, more exactly the thronum Sapientiae that she is identified with by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux.22 The theological virtues may then be arranged into a pyramid precisely in order to underscore the Virgin’s position at the peak of the conceptual, rather than architectural, structure, where she is joined by her son. The kiss between them would thus indicate their mystical marriage — and nothing would be more natural than to use the traditional type of Madonna glukophilousa or eleousa with this end in view.23 Here the Virgin and the Child are not only cheek to cheek, but leaning into a mutual kiss. The latter is admittedly not the same kiss as in, for instance, Giotto’s encounter of Joachim and Anne in the Arena Chapel. Yet this difference is due to the obviously different context and, by the same token,

to the need to retain, at least partly, Madonna’s majestic frontality. The resulting arrangement, precisely through the dematerialization of the habitual throne, is accurately described by John White who points out that ‘the weighty figure of the Virgin becomes the apex of a formal pyramid of unprecedented grandeur and solidity’.24

White thus recognizes the singular complexity of the whole painting where the formal pyramid contrasts with the stratified haloes that ‘seem to bring about, not the collapse of the otherwise convincing space, but a suggestion of infinity, as tiers of heavenly hosts stretches back into distance.’25 More recently, a similar line of thought about our picture was followed and taken further by Hayden Maginnis who offers a concise summary of the formal problems of this picture by insisting on its ostensible lack of a coherent spatial articulation: ‘beyond ornament and its spatial peculiarities, the picture is more significantly the depiction of a world characterized by amazing spatial inconsistencies and strange puzzles. … In general, the distribution of specific colors creates surface connections that play havoc with the theoretical distribution of forms.’26 Maginnis concludes on a difficulty to explain this mysterious artifice that seems to have no precedent and no true echoes in Ambrogio’s career. From this point of view, the Massa Marittima Maestà could be taken for an isolated experiment. If so, however, it is all the more urgent to discover some logic and intention behind its visible organisation.

The logic, I submit, is one of bringing together two pictorial schemes that are usually kept apart as subject matter for two distinct genres of image. Although a fourteenth-century painter would hardly put things this way, the whole point of such an unusual combination would be to remind us that seen from within our temporal and temporary existence, certain imagini represent (and are fundamentally meant to represent) the breaking point of storia and, by the same token, of our everyday perceptual habits. It is then equally true that seen from the so to speak next level of the ‘otherworldly’ stance, every image is still transitory, precisely in virtue of its being an image. This subtle dialectic, irreducible to any particular textual source except the very doctrine of Creation of the visible and transitory world, is at the heart of the devotional art as such. Quite obviously this does not mean that every artist strives to bring it out in each of his commissions. But it would be equally preposterous to deny that, especially in the first half of the fourteenth century, some devotional paintings do exhibit a high degree of experimentation that seems to indicate the painter’s awareness of the paradoxical dimension of his enterprise.

In the Massa Marittima Maestà, the already mentioned dematerialization of the picture is thus achieved by different pictorial means and not limited to the elimination of the sculpted throne. There is no doubt that we are looking at an immediately recognizable Maestà but its distance from the Maestà by Duccio or


from the great Maestà by Simone Martini is equally striking, despite the fact that Ambrogio seems to have reacted to both of these paintings.27 The comparison with Ambrogio’s own Maestà painted for Sant’Agostino in Siena makes more sense but, except for the already mentioned absence of the throne, the pictorial solution of the heavenly non-space is different and equally unique. In Sant’Agostino, two Seraphim wings flank the whole Madonna, thus forming a mandorla — a solution reminiscent of the relief executed by Domenico di Agostino in the tympanum of the Petroni doorway in the first cloister of San Francesco in Siena (dated 1336).28 In Massa Marittima, we face a different composition whose own distinctive feature is to show the Virgin in Majesty as incorporating the Virgin as Assunta.

My point is not that the image of Assunta is, despite the theological precariousness of the story of the Assumption, narratively implied in every Maestà.29 What I wish to suggest is rather that, in Ambrogio’s painting, the two are identical in precisely the same degree as the Virgin loses her fully personal identity that inevitably relies on the narrative of her earthly life. Once again, it is not that Ambrogio elaborates a sort of storia by juxtaposing two imagini. Rather, he brings out the truly universal and non-narrative dimension of the image, even at the price of literally drowning the panel’s composition in a series of visual contradictions. Now, in order to give this suggestion some flesh, we need to turn back to the picture, more exactly to the figures of ten clearly distinguishable angels, all turned towards the Virgin but endowed with different functions.

We have already mentioned two angels who hold up the cushion on which the Virgin is seated, meaning that the cushion is not laid on a throne.30 Below, two more angels swing censers, with some vigour, towards the Virgin and, still further down, Ambrogio has placed two pairs of musical angels. These, identified as ‘apparently the first angel-musicians in all Italian art’,31 seem to be the most obvious prefiguration of what will become a recurrent theme in many later Assumptions. As such, they deserve some attention.

On a closer view, the angels play four different cord instruments: the two on the Virgin’s right a vielle di canto and a psaltery; [2] the two on her left a vielle di bordone and a citole (from the picture it also seems that the angels with a psaltery and a citole may be singing). [3] From this arrangement, Giuseppe Paolo Cecere infers that the angels on the Virgin’s right perform the song’s melody, while the angels on her left produce its harmony.32 In any case, the picture might indicate an affirmative answer to the question of whether the trecento musicians used stringed instruments in the performance of polyphonic music.33 Given the lack of truly unequivocal evidence about practice of trecento performance, no suggestion of this kind can be entirely conclusive. Yet it connects, in my analysis, with the important place that we should

assign Ambrogio’s Massa Maestà in the multitude of literally hundreds of trecento images with fiddle.34 Ambrogio’s picture is repeatedly quoted by both musicologists and art historians, yet the musicologists tend to focus on the instruments and the hands that hold them without paying special attention to the angelic or human nature of the performers.35 By contrast, the art historians are much more sensitive to this last point, but then they may be inclined to pass by the issues of exactly what instruments we are looking at, what music are we invited to imagine, and whether, in this respect, there are some further differences to be found within this or that particular type of image (for instance Maestà or Assumption).

These perspectives need to be brought together. Only then can we properly evaluate (1) the importance of the fact that the musicians are angels, and (2) the importance of what music they are most likely performing. First, I wish to restate that Ambrogio’s four musical angels are much closer to a refined performance of learned music than to popular music (be it a music in the public space or a tune that a single minstrel may play on a fiddle during a banquet — like, for instance, in Giotto’s Feast of Herod in Peruzzi Chapel in Santa Croce). One might even speculate that the choice and the particular arrangement of cord instruments imply a reference to a celestial harmony that, given the context, would be most proper.36 Yet even without such a speculation we may safely assume that the depicted arrangement implies the highest clarity of sound and, by the same token, music in its undistorted form. By placing both viellas in the foreground, Ambrogio offers a sort of pictorial rendering of Johannes de Grocheio’s affirmation, in his De musica (c.1300), about the place of viella among string instruments and, at the same time, about the more general privilege of the latter:

‘Among all the stringed instruments seen by us the fiddle [viella] appears to be deserving of first place. For as the soul having understanding virtually includes within itself all other forms of ability, and as the tetragon the triangle, and as the larger number the smaller, thus does the fiddle include within itself all other instruments. It may be that some move the minds of men with more earnest sound, as do the drum and trumpet in feasts, jousts and tourneys, but on a fiddle all musical forms are more precisely distinguished… A good artist plays on the fiddle every cantus and cantilena and every musical form in general (et omnem formam musicalem generaliter).’37

Other sources make it plausible to associate the fiddle (a fortiori in the depicted constellation) with erudite polyphony and ecclesiastical music.38 Introducing the musical angels, Ambrogio strives to suggest a dynamic performance which has nothing to do with static icons or conventional ornaments. His realism in depicting the instruments is extraordinary. A close inspection seems to confirm that he gave his viellas (or at least the one on the right) the curved bridge that enables



the performer to play on individual strings.39 An equally wonderful and rarely noticed touch is reserved for the angel with the psaltery, who holds a tuning peg. This may be an understated and playful hint at both the power and limits of all art: to be made audible, even the purest harmony requires careful tuning.40

Whether we value such a detail or not, the four music-making angels are depicted here with a rarely paralleled purity. It is certainly true that, in contrast to human musicians whose instruments often imply a distinction in social status (played in their particular social setting, they indicate the either popular or aristocratic character of the music), the same hierarchies need not apply among the ‘classless angels’.41 Still Ambrogio’s choice of introducing the musical angels as playing cords, rather than the less exact winds and percussion, is intriguing.42 And there certainly is no contradiction with an even more striking fact of an entirely different order, namely the amazing proliferation of music-making angels in the Sienese and Florentine territory in the years of the execution of the Massa Maestà, and then decades after. Here we need not construe any simple causal story, since my line of argument does not depend on the premise that other painters appropriated Ambrogio’s (hypothetical) invention. To the best of my knowledge, only two competitors could come forward to claim the historical priority but, at the end of the day, they both confirm that the issue is not one of some specific evolutionary pattern but of a series of particular solutions. The important

thing is, what particular pictorial scheme the musical angels are meant to supplement, and what are the exact means deployed to this effect?

The musical angels in the Baroncelli Altarpiece may have preceded Ambrogio’s image by a couple of years. Yet the reasonable dating of the former to 1332–1334 is less important for the present issue than the difference in design that puts both works somewhat apart. In contrast with the Massa Maestà, the side-panels of the Baroncelli Altarpiece present us with a large and less homogeneous ensemble of the music-making angels. The position of the fiddle-playing angels is partly similar, but the presence of the wind instruments is very strong, and the overall impression, clearly intended, is one of a majestic assembly of saints and angels that share the same pictorial space. As far as the composition of the orchestra is concerned, this Coronation is depicted as a public event.43

The other relevant ensemble of the music-making angels is most likely posterior to the Massa Maestà. While it is closer to the Baroncelli Altarpiece by the inclusion of a large musical ensemble, it clearly belongs to the genealogy of the Sienese art. Today in the Alte Pinakoteca in Munich, this Assumption confronts the spectator with angels arranged in a ‘public orchestra’ that ‘accompanies the Virgin on her way to heaven.’44 Neither the attribution nor the dating of this panel is an easy matter. To my mind, Joseph Polzer’s attribution to Lippo Memmi and his dating of the work in around 1340 can be accepted as a solid

3 / Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Maestà, c. 1335 (detail)tempera and gold, wood, 161 × 209 cmMassa Marittima, Palazzo ComunalePhoto: © 2016 Photo Scala, Florence


working hypothesis.45 In any case, the pictorial scheme and the stylistic features of the Munich panel point towards the circle of Simone Martini.46 It is thus obvious that its later dating need not imply any influence of Ambrogio’s panel on this probably quite independent work. And it is equally clear that — in contrast with Ambrogio’s work, that seems to have had little impact on other particular paintings — the Munich Assumption attracted a certain number of important imitations, including the Ovile Master’s Assumption (Pinacoteca, Siena)47 and, at a later date, the polyptych by Taddeo di Bartolo (Montepulciano, Cathedral, 1401, with the first Sienese representation of the Virgin’s empty tomb).48

These imitations confirm that the music-making angels and the event of the Assumption were perceived as congenial. Still more important, however, is the sense of permeability that accompanies pictorial schemes connected with the eternal life of the Virgin. A certain degree of iconographic fluidity and eclecticism infuse the image with elements that naturally enhance the narrative dimension of both the image and its perception. In our case, this sort of impurity opens the image to a figurative passage from the earthly to the celestial realm where the last remnants of naturalistic location dissolve. Indicating this passage, the music-making angels are the only somewhat naturalistic part of the overall scheme of Ambrogio’s Maestà. From this point of view, and in this particular case, it is precisely the realism of the musical performance that signals the potential for a narrative enlargement of the Maestà scheme. And there is certainly no contradiction between this enlargement and the important conclusion reached by Henk van Os from a developmental perspective, namely that, in the hands of the Sienese artists, it is the Assumption scheme that became prone to narrative expansion.49

In itself, the particular representation of the four music-making angels offers no direct evidence for the merging of the two pictorial schemes. The subsequent predominant presence of musical angels in the scheme of Assumptions is perhaps telling but equally inconclusive. Still, in the overall compositional logic of Ambrogio’s panel, the visible representation of angelic music not only indicates a transition from the sphere of the visible to the sphere of the audible, but it also supplies a more precarious connection between the sensible and the supra-sensible realms. Here the music helps to lift the Virgin and, were Ambrogio inspired by the Baroncelli Altarpiece, his purification of its musical setting would reinforce precisely this impression. Again, this would not have been a simply quantitative reduction. Moved from the side-panels to the centre of the altarpiece, the four angels can be elaborated in more detail, and thus more realistically. In this context, the qualitative reduction of the instruments, whereby winds and tambours are excluded, seems at least equally important.

To pursue this line of thought would lead to the issue of whether only this, rather than any alternative musical performance, would be meaningful in the context of the Augustinian commission and the designated function of the image. Unfortunately, we do not seem to have any clear notion of what might have been the Massa Marittima Hermits’ position on music and its place in the liturgy. What is certain is that from Augustine himself, more exactly from Book 6 of his De musica, a theological understanding of music can be drawn that makes it precisely the art that helps us to ascend from the world of senses to what is incorporeal. It would be unwarranted to draw a parallel between this ascension and the Assumption, but that the former might accompany the latter in the viewer’s soul appears uncontroversial (and is not at odds with Augustine’s oscillation between a growing distrust towards musical practice and his belief in music’s ability to communicate what is truly divine). By contrast, we can almost certainly leave aside the details of Augustine’s discussion of music and its effects in relation to number and rhythm. In the Middle Ages, his theory was mostly displaced by Boethius’ De musica.50 Also, at a riper age, Augustine himself became much more sceptical about any usefulness of the liberal arts including music, although he apparently still approved of cantus in the church.51

All in all, the Augustinian heritage invites us to look at our panel in two very different ways. Given Augustine’s scepticism about the arts, the depiction of one art by another art must be put at an even lower value. Yet we can just as well assume that the mute picture of the music-making angels aims at (and indeed communicates) the divine nature of music that only our mind can hear and which is eternally untainted by the limits of human senses and imperfect performances. At the same time, the previously-mentioned peg in the hand of the psaltery-playing angel brings us back (or down) to the latter.

It is thus difficult to decide whether Ambrogio truly meant his angelic quartet, led by two viellas, to represent music in its fundamental role of a bridge between the sensible and the supra-sensible. Nevertheless, I tend to take the pre-eminence of the viellas and the absence of winds or tambours for a significant element of the pictorial scheme. The latter’s overall ascending motion therefore includes a turn towards the quiet, more contemplative music, away from its noisy and potentially distracting counterpart. This would fit well with the already mentioned importance of viella in Grocheio’s De musice. At a slightly earlier date, Elias of Salomon (Scientia Artis Musicae, 1274) and Jerome of Moravia (Tratatus de Musica, ca. 1280–130052) also praise viella’s unsurpassable qualities in the same spirit.53 Moreover, Jerome of Moravia structures his treatise in order to arrive, in its last chapter, at practice on string instruments. Christopher Page reminds us that



this progression comes from a long-standing tradition that can be traced back through Hucbald (d. 930) to Regino Prumensis (d. 915) and summarized as follows: ‘any discussion of music must end with musica artificialis, including instruments, so that the invisible may be finally demonstrated by means of the visible.’54

Now no matter how the above-discussed progression differs from depicting the musical performance in visible shape and colour, the question of how to bring the music down to the sensible realm with as little distortion as possible is much the same, and the devotional context naturally reinforces this common aim. The painter does not treat the technicalities of musical scales and keys, yet it is quite plausible that he is aware of the limitations proper to the keyless wind instruments of the period. I am not qualified to trespass on the turf of the ‘period ear’55 and I do not wish to speculate any further on the visual evocation of the music actually unheard. Nevertheless, I take it that we can conclude relatively safely that Ambrogio’s scheme is quite original. Whereas the Munich panel and its various imitators naturalize the Heaven the Virgin is entering, he takes the opposite direction, and dematerializes the music that accompanies the Virgin on her Assumption.

To conclude, I wish to present another piece of evidence for a strong implication of the Assumption scheme in our painting. Inconclusive in itself, this element of the Massa Maestà is significantly juxtaposed with the throneless Virgin and the music-making angels. It consists, quite simply, of the figures of the two remaining angels who are casting white lilies and red roses over the Virgin. Similar pairs of angels with the same lilies and roses are quite common in the Sienese and Florentine painting of the period, but similarity need not imply a strict identity of function. The two most relevant examples are probably due to Simone Martini and Giotto. In the latter’s Ognissanti Madonna the bouquets of lilies and roses (put in the vase) are held to the Virgin by two kneeling angels who are placed below her, at each side of her throne. Their gesture is one of patient offering and the same is true of two other kneeling angels in Simone Martini’s great Maestà in the Sienese Palazzo Pubblico. In the Massa Maestà the angels’ gesture and position are different: Ambrogio has them standing, with their hands up and slightly above the Virgin, in the process of throwing the bouquets down on her. What we see here is a welcoming gesture.

In conjunction with the four music-making angels, these two welcoming angels with their red roses and white lilies point quite directly to Jacopus da Voragine’s Golden Legend, a text sufficiently popular to be known to Ambrogio and acceptable for the Hermits. After all, the fourteenth century took Jacopus for an authority on Augustine, whose entire corpus he was supposed to have learnt by heart.56 Other textual references are possible. Rowley and Frugoni find Ambrogio to be inspired by Dante’s Purgatory, Canto 30, not only because

of the flowers mentioned here, but because Beatrice appears clad in the colours of theological virtues, who are themselves personified in the immediately preceding Canto 29. Such a reading is intriguing and cannot be disproved, but all we can establish is a partial parallel between the two scenes, not an exact reference from the painting to the text. The Golden Legend is thus a more promising and perhaps direct source for Ambrogio’s simultaneous casting of the Maestà as Madonna Assunta.

Finally, a third source may be evoked — the first sermon on the Assumption by Dante’s ultimate guide in the Commedia, the previously mentioned Bernard of Clairvaux. Emphasizing the almost inconceivable splendour of the Virgin’s journey heavenwards, the multitude of the heavenly legions that meet her, and the kiss between the mother and her son, Bernard seems almost to anticipate Ambrogio’s attempt to use the visual in order to indicate that it is about to be dissolved in the visionary.57 Whether we are witness here to the direct influence of Bernard or not, his exalted words find a clear echo in Ambrogio’s visual splendour. The painterly references to the Virgin’s Assumption are then not a case of a static merging of two established iconographical schemes, those of the Assunta and the Maestà. In its devotional context that presupposes the permeability of the frontier between painted image and mental image, the resulting picture is, first and foremost, a guide to the viewer’s ascending consciousness.

To represent the Virgin in Majesty at the peak of her ascent is typical of Ambrogio’s versatility in transforming the inherited pictorial schemes.58 In this respect, the Massa Maestà exhibits the same iconographic fluidity that appears, for instance, in the Buon governo murals. In itself, the practice of merging distinct iconographical schemes is not unusual. Our case is however different from the practice of depicting the Assumption in a simple juxtaposition with the Dormition or the Coronation of the Virgin.59 In this conjunction, the programme consists in a chronological sequence of events forming a straightforward narrative. Ambrogio deploys a different device. A new, highly complex and stratified iconography brings out what the image of Maestà implies generically: not a sequence of narrated events, but the passage towards the realm that ultimately resists representation.

Here as elsewhere, devotional art is bound to rely on the proleptic dimension of the image. The efficacy of this art depends upon this dimension, and therefore upon our sense of ‘before’ and ‘after’. Beyond its directly represented subject, the devotional image should provoke a proleptic vision in a larger sense that implies the promise of the viewer’s own future change. It has been rightly emphasized that trecento panel painting, especially in the terra di Siena, invented new aesthetic strategies of showing the invisible via the visible while, at the same time, letting the image focus on ‘its own function as visual membrane between the here-and-now and


beyond, in the sense of a mediation of the invisible presence of transcendence.’60 Here the painterly intelligence operates in a zone in between the intricacies of theological discourse and the directness of contracts. The latter may well have stipulated the reproduction modo et forma of some earlier prototypes, but there was still room enough for invention and experiment.

The dangers of over-interpreting an altarpiece like the Massa Maestà can thus be avoided without falling into the positivist historical mode. Pictures are neither arguments nor illustrations.61 They can easily borrow their lavish perceptible details from the material yet radically transient world and, by the same token, enlarge their inherent naturalism beyond its time and space. In this way, in a picture like Ambrogio’s Massa Maestà, the angelic welcome to the Virgin and the pyramid of theological virtues, with Charity at its apex, invite the viewer to the same ascent from natural to supernatural love.

notes

1 See, for instance, Henk van Os, ‘Some thoughts on writing a his-tory of Sienese altarpieces’, in Peter Humfrey and Martin Kemp (eds), The Altarpiece in the Renaissance, Cambridge 1990, pp. 21–33. — Charles Hope, ‘Altarpieces and the Requirements of Patrons’, in Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (eds), Christianity and Renaissance, Syracuse 1990, pp. 535–571. — For a study of the polyptychs’ programmes see Joanna Cannon, ‘The Creation, Meaning, and Audience of the Early Sienese Polyptychs: Evidence from the Friars’,Eve Borsook and Fiorella Superbi Gioffredi (eds), Italian Altarpieces 1250–1550. Function and Design, Oxford 1994, pp. 41–79.

2 See Paul Hills, ‘The Renaissance altarpiece: a valid category?’, in Humfrey and Kemp (note 1), pp. 34–48.

3 Diana Norman, ‘“In the Beginning Was the Word”: an Altarpiece by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the Augustinian Hermits of Massa Marittima’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte LVIII, 1995, pp. 478–503.

4 Henk van Os, Sienese Altarpieces 1215–1460, Groningen 1984, I, pp. 58–61, argues for the specific commission of this painting for the Massa Marittima’ church of Sant’Agostino. In her review of van Os’s book in The Burlington Magazine CXXVII, 1985, p. 391, Christa Gardner von Teuffel suggests that the panel was commissioned for the adjacent church of San Pietro. Her suggestion is based on the relatively modest presence (rather than pre-eminence) of Saint Augustine among the depicted saints. A sympathetic examination of this suggestion is carried out by Norman (note 3), pp. 487–492.

5 See George Rowley, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Princeton 1958, I, p. 60. — John White, Art and Architecture in Italy 1250–1400, New Haven and London 1993, p. 383. — Howard Hibbard, ‘A Representation of Fides by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, The Art Bulletin XXXIX, 1957, pp. 137–138. — Norman E. Muller, ‘Reflections in a mirror: Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s depiction of the Trinity’, Art Bulletin LXI, 1979, pp. 101–102. — The richest treatment of the unusual iconography of Faith and her mirror is Herbert L. Kessler, ‘Speculum’, Speculum LXXXVI, 2011, pp. 1–41. Importantly for my own interpretation, Kessler is attentive to this panel’s suggestion of ascending

motion, which he connects to how Ambrogio invites the viewer to espouse this ascent. See his pp. 21 and 23: ‘His ability to advance the new artistic technology is evident already in his positioning of Mary and Christ at the top of three broad steps that invite the viewer to participate in religious drama, enacted by angels and saints. The ascent into the painting is conducted by the theological virtues whose names are chiselled into the stone and coloured in Trinitarian hues: white FIDES, green SPES, and red CARITAS. Winged like angels, the Virtues also reinforce the spiritual continuum; Grosseteste, among other Latin authors, had appropriated the Pseudo-Areopagite’s notion that angels occupy a key position in the hierarchy that moves from carnal to spiritual vision.’

6 Norman (note 3), p. 500. At the same time, one should not entirely forget the special relation (involving a certain distance) between the Augustinians (both Canons and Hermits) and the historical theolo-gian Augustine. The former were not always the privileged custodians of the latter’s legacy. See Meredith J. Gill, Augustine in the Italian Renaissance: Art and Philosophy from Petrarch to Michelangelo, Cambridge 2005, pp. 6–8.

7 Cf. Martin Kemp, ‘Introduction. The altarpiece in the Renaissance: a taxonomic approach’, in Humfrey and Kemp (note 1), pp. 1–17, esp. p. 15.

8 See the analyses by Charles Hope (note 1). Cf. Idem, ‘Religious Narrative in Renaissance Art’, Journal of the Royal Society of Arts CXXXIV, 1986, pp. 804–818.

9 This summarizing expression comes from Charles Hope (note 1), p. 538.

10 Diana Norman (note 3), p. 481, who refers to Rowley (note 5), pp. 57–62. — Enzo Carli, L’Arte a Massa Marittima, Siena 1976, p. 60. — Henk Van Os (note 4), I, pp. 58–61. — John White (note 5), pp. 382–384.

11 F. Mason Perkins, ‘The Forgotten Masterpiece of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, The Burlington Magazine V, 1904, p. 81: Madonna is ‘seated on a throne supported by two angels’. Perkins’ article is partly inspired by Giovanni Cagnola, ‘Di un cadro poco noto del Lorenzetti’, Rassegna d’arte II, 1902, p. 143, but the lush description of the painting is his own.

12 Rowley (note 5), I, p. 58. The idiosyncrasies of Rowley’s approach and of his attributions need not bother us here.

13 Timothy Hyman, Sienese Painting: The Art of a City-Republic (1278–1477), London 2003, p. 100.

14 Chiara Frugoni, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Florence 1998, p. 47.

15 Cf. Hayden B. J. Maginnis, Painting in the Age of Giotto. A Historical Reevaluation, University Park (Penn.) 1997, p. 184: ‘In that work [sc. Sant’ Agostino Maestà], the Virgin and Child, lacking even the support of a cushion, miraculously float among cherubim while Saint Catherine offers up her own, severed head.’

16 Cf. Millard Meiss, Painting in Florence and Siena after the Black Death, Princeton 1951, p. 15 (on the Madonna by Nardo di Cione, now in the New-York Historical Society) and n. 16 (with further examples).

17 Hibbard (note 5), p. 137.18 I cannot elaborate here upon the possibility — suggested by

the anonymous reader for this journal — to see the ascending pyramid of the theological virtues and angels-as-throne in the light of the Pseudo-Dionysian ‘celestial hierarchy’. The musical angels would represent the lowest triad of angelic beings, the virtues would correspond to the second and intermediate level, and the angels-as-thrones would indeed be ‘Thrones’, that is angelic beings akin to (albeit lower than) Seraphim and Cherubim. Even if the Pseudo-Dionysian De coelesti hierar-chia differs from the Augustinian strands of medieval Neoplatonism, it



was highly influential (Dante comes to mind here) and certainly known in Augustinian circles.

19 I leave aside the problem of this figure’s identity. I do not exactly agree that, in the case of the Buon governo, the theological virtues are better executed, which seems to be the claim of Giulietta Chelazzi Dini, in idem. — Alessandro Angelini and Bernardina Sani, Pittura senese, Milano 1997, p. 156: ‘Senza dubbio le virtù teologali della Maestà di Massa Marittima sono a nostro parere tra le figure allegoriche di più alta qualità e preannunciano le migliori personificazioni che Ambrogio eseguirà dopo poco nel Buon governo del Palazzo Pubblico di Siena.’ It should also be noted that the Massa Marittima Charity, in her semi-transparent draped dress, is Ambrogio’s first appropriation of the classical ninfa. Others are the Peace on the central wall of the Buon governo fresco and the Justice on its right wall, and the figure of Eve in Ambrogio’s fresco at Montesiepi.

20 Chiara Frugoni, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, in idem, Pietro e Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Florence 2002, p. 156. For some reason, Frugoni still speaks about six music-making angels; there are, as we shall see, only four.

21 Sharon Dale, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Maestà at Massa Marittima’, Source II, 1989, pp. 6–11 (here p. 9).

22 For a similar identification see an antiphon from the Divine Office (used in the liturgy of the Assumption, see Corpus Antiphonalium, 4.448), in a sermon by Guerric d’Igny (PL CLXXXV, cols 190–193), and in Bernard of Clairvaux’s Sermon of the Song of Songs, XXVII.9. Bernard’s widespread influence in Ambrogio’s time is beyond dispute and its traces in an Augustinian commission are not implausible. Also, to place Charity on top of the three theological virtues is an eminently Bernardean solution. On Bernard, his Sermons on the Song of Songs and the importance of Charity see Frédéric Nef, ‘“Caritas dat caritatem”. La métaphysique de la charité dans les Sermons sur le Cantique des cantiques et l’ontologie de la contemplation’, in Rémi Brague (ed.), Saint Bernard et la philosophie, Paris 1993, pp. 87–108.

23 For Massa Marittima Maestà and Madonna eleousa see Henk van Os, ‘The Culture of Prayer’, in idem (ed.), The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe. 1300–1500, Amsterdam 1994, pp. 50–86 (here p. 66).

24 White (note 5), p. 383.25 White (note 5), p. 384.26 Maginnis (note 15), pp. 133–134.27 See Norman (note 3), p. 481.28 For this convincing parallel see Max Seidel, ‘The Frescoes by

Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Sant’Agostino in Siena’, in idem, Italian Art of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Volume 1: Painting, Venice 2003, p. 361.

29 I cannot enter here this historically complex issue on which see, for instance, Stephen J. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, Oxford 2002.

30 The figure of one cushion-bearing angel is sometimes attributed to Ambrogio’s pupil, possibly the same who painted the figure of the Archangel Michael in the Maestà in the Sienese Sant’Agostino. This was suggested by Seidel (note 28), p. 377.

31 Hyman (note 13), p. 100. Hyman’s statement needs to be qualified since angel-musicians appear already in Giotto’s work. While the apothe-osis of St. Francis in the Lower Church in Assisi shows angels with wind instruments, the upper part of the triumphal arch in the Scrovegni-Chapel in Padua (with God sending Gabriel to Mary) depicts angels with a wider variety of cords and winds. On the Baroncelli polyptych in Santa Croce, the angelic orchestra assists the Virgin’s Coronation by playing both cords and wind instruments. I thank the anonymous reader for this journal for her or his comments on this issue including the important

reminder that the angel-musicians seem to appear in the early Trecento in parallel with the Ars Nova in music. All this would merit an independ-ent inquiry that would extend to miniatures and other media.

32 See G. Paolo Cecere, ‘Gli strumenti musicali nella Maestà di Massa Marittima’, L’Unicorno V, 1994, pp. 16–17. For a detailed reconstruc-tion of the instruments see Fabio Galgani, Gli strumenti musicali nella Maestà di Ambrogio Lorenzetti a Massa Marittima. Analisi storica e riconstru-zione, Massa Marittima 2000.

33 On this issue see Howard Mayer Brown, ‘The trecento fiddle and its bridges’, Early Music XVII, 1989, pp. 309–329, who offers a more general analysis of the trecento instruments and music-making than his title indicates.

34 For the catalogue of some 350 pictures of amazing variety see H. M. Brown, ‘A Corpus of Trecento Pictures with Musical Subject Matter, Part I’, Imago musicae I, 1984, pp. 189–244.

35 For an exclusive focus on angels, see, however, Howard Mayer Brown, ‘Trecento Angels and the Instruments They Play’, in Edward Olleson (ed.), Modern Musical Scholarship, Stockfield 1978, pp. 112–140. Brown (p. 119) suggests that we need not take the presence of the four angels for a ‘realist’ borrowing from some actually existing musical ensemble; it may be a variation upon the model of David and his four assistants: what better way of showing Mary adored by the music-making angels ‘than to borrow the most obvious and common image of the praise for heavenly things, namely, David with four assistants.’ For some more general comments on this suggestion see Leslie Lassetter, ‘Music Iconography and Medieval Performance’, College Music Symposium XXXI, 1991, pp. 91–116.

36 One would then have to follow various suggestions made by, e.g., Leo Spitzer, ‘Classical and Christian Ideas of World Harmony. Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word “Stimmung”’, Traditio II, 1944, pp. 409–464, and Traditio III, 1945, pp. 307–364. — Kathie Meyer-Baer, Music of the Spheres and the Dance of Death. Studies in Musical Iconology, Princeton 1970. — Martine Clouzot, ‘Les anges musiciens aux XIV-XVe siècles. Figuration et idéalisation du cosmos divin’, in Andrea von Hülsen-Esch and Jean-Claude Schmitt (eds), Die Methodik der Bildinterpretation, Göttingen 2002, pp. 495–528. — Oliver Huck, ‘The Music of Angels in Fourteenth- and Early Fifteenth-Century Music’, Musica Disciplina LIII, 2003–2008, pp. 99–119.

37 Ernst Roloff, Die Musiktraktat des Johannes de Grocheo, Leipzig 1943, p. 52. I borrow the English translation from Mary Remnant, ‘The di-versity of medieval fiddles’, Early Music III, 1975, pp. 47–51 (here p. 49).

38 For a list of references to the late medieval treatises see Christopher Page, ‘Jerome of Moravia on the Rubeba and Viella’, The Galpin Society Journal XXXII, 1979, pp. 77–98 (here pp. 80–85).

39 See illustration 4a in Brown (note 33), p. 313.40 I wish to thank Daniela Thein who turned my attention to

the tuning peg. Cf. Cecere (note 32), p. 16: the angel with the psaltery holds ‘something in his hand’, possibly a tuning peg.

41 This expression comes from Brown (note 33), p. 313.42 For the choice of cords as opposed to winds cf. Cecere

(note 32), p. 17. — Eleonora M. Beck, ‘Mirrors and Music in the Decameron’, Heliotropia VII, 2010, pp. 81–103 (here p. 86). Certainly the music depicted here is very different from the secular or public one we find in the Buon governo fresco. Quentin Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s ‘Buon governo Frescoes: Two Old Questions, Two New Answers’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes LXII, 1999, pp. 1–28, suggests that the music in the Buon governo is connected


to melancholy and the need to chase it away through song and dance. In both otherwise different cases, Ambrogio’s invention would reflect a subtle understanding of both the rational and the emotional dimen-sions of his theme.

43 A thorough formal influence of the Baroncelli altarpiece on the Massa Maestà was defended by Andrew Peter, ‘Giotto and Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, The Burlington Magazine LXXVI, 1940, pp. 3–5, pp. 7–9 (here p. 8). Its design is probably by Giotto himself. It was probably executed by his workshop, including Taddeo Gaddi. For more on this issue including the dating and the relation between its panels and the murals in the chapel see at least Julian Gardner, ‘The Decoration of the Baroncelli Chapel in Santa Croce’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte XXXIV, 1971, pp. 89–114. Norman (note 3), p. 484 and n. 16, reminds us of the efforts to establish some relation between the theological virtues in the Baroncelli Chapel and in the Massa Maestà. This issue is immaterial to the present argument — besides, little seems to be gained from this rather superficial comparison and Norman is right to conclude that ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti devised a characteristically original interpretation for all three of these allegorical figures.’ By contrast, the presence of music-making angels in both paintings has not attracted much interest. Joseph Polzer, ‘The “Master of the Rebel Angels” Reconsidered’, The Art Bulletin LXIII, 1981, pp. 563–584 (here pp. 575–576), does not mention Lorenzetti but quotes the music-making angels in the Baroncelli Altarpiece as the only known precedent to the angelic orchestra in the Munich Assumption. This is right as far as the large musical ensembles are concerned.

44 Polzer (note 43), p. 575.45 Polzer (note 43), pp. 575–581, is admirably sensitive to the musi-

cal element of the painting. Hendrik Willem van Os, Marias Demut und Verherrlichung in der sienesischen Malerei 1300–1450, s’-Gravenhage 1969, pp. 165–166, dates the panel perhaps too early (to 1320–1330). Giovanni Previtali, ‘Introduzione ai problemi della bottega di Simone Martini’, in Luciano Bellosi (ed.), Simone Martini. Atti del convegno (Siena, 1985), Florence 1988, pp. 151–166 (here p. 162), offers an inconclusive re-attribution of the panel to Simone Martini.

46 Maginnis (note 15), p. 183, takes the Munich panel to imitate ‘a lost work by Simone Martini’.

47 Attributed to Bartolomeo Bulgarini in Maginnis (note 15), Color Plate 16.

48 The list of other paintings influenced by the scheme present in the Munich Assumption is long and includes, in no particular order, the Assumptions by Paolo Giovanni di Fei (National Gallery of Art, Washington), Francesco di Vannuccio (Girton College, Cambridge), Andrea di Bartolo (Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond) and Sano di Pietro (Pinacoteca, Siena). See also a fine miniature on the frontis-piece to Codex Caleffo by Niccolò di Ser Sozzo di Stefano (Archivio di Stato, Siena). The musical angels appear, of course, in other pictures as well. See Bernado Daddi’s San Pancracio polyptych with two angels as fiddlers, or Sano di Pietro’s Virgin and the Child (Siena, Pinacoteca) with two musical angels playing a fiddle and a tambour. Also, we find two angels with a fiddle and a harp in Giovanni di Paolo’s Virgin and Child Enthroned with Saints (Friedsam Collection). A possible although much simplified echo of the Massa Maestà is present in the Virgin with the Child and Music-making Angels by Giovanni di Paolo in Castelnuovo Berardenga, Church of Santi Giusto e Clemente. There are six beauti-ful musical angels in Gregorio di Cecco di Luca’s Virgin of Humility with Angels and Saints (Siena, Museo dell’opera di Duomo). Finally,

a special mention must be made of Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio, whose Coronation of the Virgin (Montepulciano, Museo civico) belongs to a Martinian revival of the 1360s and offers an intimate Coronation with four kneeling musical angels whose instruments are (probably) two viellas, a portable organ and a harp. For more on this painting see Luciano Bellosi, ‘Jacopo di Mino del Pellicciaio’, Bollettino d’arte LVII, 1972, pp. 63–73. Later on, a similar choice to accompany the Coronation by two music-making angels was made by Giovanni di Paolo in The Coronation of the Virgin with Saints Andrew and Peter and Angels (Siena, Sant’Andrea). For more on the Assumption in Sienese art see Meiss (note 16), pp. 21–24, and van Os (note 38), pp. 143–177. In a different medium and outside Siena, we should not forget Orcagna’s relief in the Florentine Orsanmichele on which see Brendan Cassidy, ‘The Assumption of the Virgin on the Tabernacle of Orsanmichele’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes LI, 1988, pp. 174–181. Even more intriguing is the presence of the four angels with cord instruments in Niccolò di Cecco del Mercia’s relief of the descent of the Assunta’s gir-dle to the apostle Thomas (Prato, 1358–1360).

49 See van Os (note 45), pp. 167–168: ‘Auf den frühesten Bildern der Assunta, die es in der sienesischen Kunst gibt, ist die Erde überhaupt nicht da. Die Künstler lenken unsere Gedanken vielmehr auf der Himmel, wo Maria von den ‘cives celi’ und ihren König feierlich eingeholt wird. In diesen Darstellungen ist sie im eigentlichsten Sinne des Wortes der Erde entstiegen. Mit der Zeit fügten die sienesischen Künstler den Bildern aber nimmer neue Motive hinzu, die dem Betrachter die Vorstellung stets vertrauter machen sol-lten. In dieser Ikonographie der Assunta-Darstellung sehen wir den Gegensatz zu einer Entwicklung, die wir früher ‘Isolierung zum Devotionsmotiv’ nannten. Eine vorhandene Devotionsvorstellung wird mit mehreren der Erzählung entlehnten Motiven bereichert, welche aber nicht genug untereinander zusammenhängen, um dem Bild der gen Himmel fahrenden Maria einen mehr erzählenden Charakter zu verleihen.’ Van Os focuses on this device as a means of enhancing, in the eye of the beholder, the ‘reality’ or ‘historic-ity’ of the Assumption, and he illustrates this tendency with the example of the inclusion of doubting Thomas in several Sienese Assumptions. Our case is different, but the general tendency towards the extension of the theme’s temporal frame is the same.

50 Nevertheless, Augustine did retain some influence through the Middle Ages. See William G. Waite, The Rhythm of Twelfth-Century Polyphony, New Haven 1954, pp. 35–37. For the revival of Augustine’s De musica in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries see Paul Oskar Kristeller, ‘Music and Learning in the Early Italian Renaissance’, Journal of Renaissance and Baroque Music I, 1947, pp. 255–274 (variously reprinted). On Augustine’s personal attitude to music, see Brian Brennan, Augustine’s De musica, Vigiliae Christianae XLII, 1988, pp. 267–281. On the treatise itself see Adalbert Keller, Aurelius Augustinus und die Musik: Untersuchungen zu De musica im Kontext seines Schrifttums, Würzburg 1993.

51 See various passages from Enarrationes in Psalmos, commented upon in Brennan (note 50), and in Carl Johann Perl, ‘Augustine and Music’, The Musical Quarterly XLI, 1955, pp. 496–510. Augustine made a habit of insisting on a sort of prima le parole principle: the textual meaning must not be obscured by the sound.

52 For this dating see Page (note 38), pp. 77–78.53 See Page (note 38), p. 80. Are Jerome of Moravia and Johannes de

Grocheio, writing in Paris, relevant for the Italian trecento? On this issue see Brown (note 33) whose tentatively affirmative answer on p. 325 sum-marizes the versatility of the fiddle: ‘In sum, a survey of the literary and



pictorial evidence from 14th-century Italy reveals that we can believe Johannes de Grocheo’s remark that the fiddle was appropriate to every conceivable genre and form. … Pictures, moreover, seem to confirm the literary evidence that suggests fiddles could accompany narrative or formulaic singing as well as the performance of both monophonic and polyphonic repertories, and pictures show us that some fiddlers also performed a repertory of instrumental music independently of singers, doubtless not so different from the fragments that still survive.’ Of course the greater the versatility of the instruments, the more important the particular setting chosen by the painter. The anonymous reader for this journal notes that viella is shown once from the front and once from behind, and that it could function as a symbol for Mary, here in harmony with the psalter which symbolizes Christ.

54 Page (note 38), p. 81.55 For this notion, modelled upon Michael Baxandall’s ‘period

eye’, see Rob C. Wegman, ‘Sense and Sensibility in Late-Medieval Music: Thoughts on Aesthetics and “Authenticity”’, Early Music XXIII, 1995, pp. 8–10. For a wide-ranging and pertinent discussion of similar issues see Philip Weller, ‘Frames and Images: Locating Music in Cultural Histories of the Middle Ages’, The Journal of the American Musicological Society L, 1997, pp. 7–54.

56 I owe this last point to Gill (note 6), p. 9. For the relevant passage see Patrologiae cursus completus, Latina, Paris 1844–1866, 177, col. 1219.

57 The text of Bernard’s De Assumptione is printed in Patrologia Latina CLXXXIII, cols. 415–417.

58 This is especially in line with the brief analysis by Maginnis (note 15), pp. 133–134, and with the general conclusion about Ambrogio’s panel paitings by Michel Laclotte, ‘Observations on Some Polyptychs and Altaroli by Ambrogio Lorenzetti’, in Victor M. Schmidt (ed.), Italian Panel Painting of the Duecento and Trecento (Studies in the History of Art LXI), 2002, pp. 183–197. In his last paragraph, quoting Ghiberti’s characterization of Ambrogio as genio singularissimo, Laclotte finds Ambrogio to be ‘an explorer who did not exploit all his discoveries,

an imaginative and sometimes capricious experimenter’. Consequently, there is no way for us to seriously imagine what the lost predella and pinnacle panels of the Massa Maestà might have looked like.

59 Or with the Annunciation. Cf. Pietro Lorenzetti’s polyptych in Pieve, Arezzo (commissioned in 1320). For its structure and meaning see van Os (note 4), pp. 69–74. — Alessandra Guerrini, ‘Intorno al polittico di Pietro Lorenzetti per la Pieve di Arezzo’, Rivista d’Arte XL, 1988, pp. 3–29. The enriching of the Virgin in Majesty with the Assunta could also be compared to the later conjunction of the Assumption with the Immaculate Conception. For this issue and some general remarks on the Assumption in Italian Art, see Rona Goffen, Piety and Patronage in Renaissance Venice: Bellini, Titian, and the Franciscans, New Haven 1986, pp. 91–106. And compare again Pietro Lorenzetti’s polyptych from San Pieve, Arezzo. For a brief remark on Simone Martini’s lost Assumptions from the Sienese Ospedale della Scala and the Porta Camollia, and for the possible merging of the Assunta with the Incoronata see Pierluigi Leone De Castris, Simone Martini, Milano 2003, p. 297, note 121.

60 Klaus Krüger, ‘Medium and Imagination: Aesthetic Aspects of Trecento Panel Painting’, in Schmidt (note 58), pp. 56–81 (here p. 75).

61 This simple fact does not contradict but rather confirms the im-portance of inquiring into the conditions of patronage and commissions. The role played by the mendicant orders in the history of the fourteenth-century Tuscan art can hardly be overestimated. For the special case of the Augustinians who had to cope with Augustine’s condemnation of the painting’s inherent falseness and superficiality (and were not averse to borrowing from Franciscan images) see Louise Bourdua and Anne Dunlop (eds), Art and the Augustinian Order in Early Renaissance Italy, Aldershot 2007, with references to many particular studies including those by the Centro di Studi Agostino Trapè at Tolentino (see esp. the volume Per corporalia ad incorporalia: Spiritualità, agiografia, iconogra-fia e architettura nel medioevo agostiniano, Tolentino 2000).

Musical Space in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Massa Marittima Maestà

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