A History of Siena
A History of Siena

Author: Mario Ascheri

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-08

Total Pages: 262

ISBN-13: 1351866788

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A History of Siena provides a concise and up-to-date biography of the city, from its ancient and medieval development up to the present day, and makes Siena’s history, culture, and traditions accessible to anyone studying or visiting the city. Well informed by archival research and recent scholarship on medieval Siena and the Italian city-states, this book places Siena’s development in its larger context, both temporally and geographically. In the process, this book offers new interpretations of Siena’s artistic, political, and economic development, highlighting in particular the role of pilgrimage, banking, and class conflict. The second half of the book provides an important analysis of the historical development of Siena’s nobility, its unique system of neighborhood associations (contrade) and the race of the Palio, as well as an overview of the rise and fall of Siena’s troubled bank, the Monte dei Paschi. This book is accessible to undergraduates and tourists, while also offering plenty of new insights for graduate students and scholars of all periods of Sienese history.

Siena
Siena

Author: Jane Tylus

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2015-05-15

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 022620782X

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"Siena: City of Secrets" is a charming, intimate portrait of this most secretive of cities, often overlooked by travelers to Italy. Part cultural history and intellectual memoir, part travelogue and guide book, Tylus writes with a novelist s flair, taking the reader on a quest of discovery through the well- and not-so-well-travelled roads and alleys of the ancient city. Today, Siena can appear on the surface standoffish, a bit static, and very old-fashioned, especially when compared to its larger, flashier cousins Roma and Firenze. But first impressions wear away as we learn from Tylus that Siena was, over the long view, an innovator among the cities of Italy: the first to pave its streets and main plaza (1298), the first to publicly fund its university (1321), the first to employ the promissory note (1720), the first to ban automobile traffic from its city center (1965), and much else. We also hear about Siena s great artistic and architectural past, hidden behind centuries of over painting and rebuilding, and about its resident apocryphal and not-so-apocryphal Saints. And about the distinctive characters of its different neighborhoods ( contrade ), exemplified in the highly competitive horserace that takes place annually in the city and that serves as both a dividing and a uniting force for the Sienese. Throughout we are guided by the assuring voice of a seasoned scholar with a gift for spinning a good story and with an eye for the telling detail, whether we are traveling Siena s modern highways or digging through ancient Etruscan tombs; or shadowing the path walked by medieval pilgrims; or tracking the city s financial history from its beginnings as the once-great center for commerce in the sixteenth century to its near collapse in January 2013; or celebrating literary giants Dante and Calvino or giants of the arena, Siena s Series A soccer team. A useful and entertaining guide for students of Italian culture (Tylus has written discursive, reader-friendly endnotes and included a full bibliography in the back matter), the book will also appeal to the traveler and tourist (virtual or otherwise) interested in learning more about this ancient, mysterious, reclusive citydespite itself."

The Scribe of Siena
The Scribe of Siena

Author: Melodie Winawer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2017-05-16

Total Pages: 464

ISBN-13: 1501152254

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"Equal parts ... love story and ... historical conspiracy--think The Girl with a Pearl Earring meets Outlander--debut author Melodie Winawer takes readers deep into medieval Italy, where the past and present blur and a twenty-first century woman will discover a plot to destroy Siena"--

A Month in Siena
A Month in Siena

Author: Hisham Matar

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2019-10-22

Total Pages: 145

ISBN-13: 0593129148

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From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Return comes a profoundly moving contemplation of the relationship between art and life. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND EVENING STANDARD After finishing his powerful memoir The Return, Hisham Matar, seeking solace and pleasure, traveled to Siena, Italy. Always finding comfort and clarity in great art, Matar immersed himself in eight significant works from the Sienese School of painting, which flourished from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries. Artists he had admired throughout his life, including Duccio and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, evoke earlier engagements he’d had with works by Caravaggio and Poussin, and the personal experiences that surrounded those moments. Including beautiful full-color reproductions of the artworks, A Month in Siena is about what occurred between Matar, those paintings, and the city. That month would be an extraordinary period in the writer’s life: an exploration of how art can console and disturb in equal measure, as well as an intimate encounter with a city and its inhabitants. This is a gorgeous meditation on how centuries-old art can illuminate our own inner landscape—current relationships, long-lasting love, grief, intimacy, and solitude—and shed further light on the present world around us. Praise for A Month in Siena “As exquisitely structured as The Return, driven by desire, yearning, loss, illuminated by the kindness of strangers. A Month in Siena is a triumph.”—Peter Carey

A Medieval Italian Commune
A Medieval Italian Commune

Author: William M. Bowsky

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1981-01-01

Total Pages: 374

ISBN-13: 9780520042568

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"Siena rivaled Florence in the arts throughout the 13th and 14th centuries: the important late medieval painter Duccio (1253?1319) was a Sienese, but worked across the peninsula, and the mural of "Good Government" by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico, or town hall, is a magnificent example of late-Medieval/early Renaissance art as well as a representation of the utopia of urban society as conceived during that period. Siena was devastated by the Black Death of 1348, and also suffered from ill-fated financial enterprises. In 1355, with the arrival of Charles IV of Luxembourg in the city, the population rose and suppressed the government of the Nove (Nine), establishing that Dodici (Twelve) nobles assisted by a council with a popular majority. This was also short-lived, being replaced by the Quindici (Fifteen) reformers in 1385, the Dieci (Ten, 1386?1387), Undici (Eleven, 1388?1398) and Twelve Priors (1398?1399) who, in the end, gave the city's seigniory to Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan in order to defend it from the Florentine expansionism."--Wikipedia.

Art as Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena
Art as Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena

Author: TimothyB. Smith

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1351575597

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In Art as Politics in Late Medieval and Renaissance Siena, contributors explore the evolving relationship between image and politics in Siena from the time of the city-state's defeat of Florence at the Battle of Montaperti in 1260 to the end of the Sienese Republic in 1550. Engaging issues of the politicization of art in Sienese painting, sculpture, architecture, and urban design, the volume challenges the still-prevalent myth of Siena's cultural and artistic conservatism after the mid fourteenth century. Clearly establishing uniquely Sienese artistic agendas and vocabulary, these essays broaden our understanding of the intersection of art, politics, and religion in Siena by revisiting its medieval origins and exploring its continuing role in the Renaissance.

Siena and the Virgin
Siena and the Virgin

Author: Diana Norman

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 1999-01-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0300080069

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Celebrating the Virgin Mary as both an object of religious affection and a focus of civic pride, artists of fourteenth-century Siena established for their city a vibrant tradition that continued into the early decades of the next century. Such celebratory portraits of the Virgin were also common in Siena's extensive subject territories, the contado. This richly illustrated book explores late medieval Sienese art--how it was created, commissioned, and understood by the citizens of Siena. Examining political, economic, and cultural relations between Siena and the contado, Diana Norman offers a new understanding of Marian art and its political function as an expression of civic ideology. Drawing on extensive unpublished archives, Norman reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the commission of Marian art in the three most prestigious locations of fourteenth-century Siena: the cathedral, the Palazzo Pubblico, and the hospital of Santa Maria della Scala. She analyzes similarly important commissions in the contado towns of Massa Marittima, Montalcino, and Montepulciano. Casting new light on such topics as the original site for the reliquary tomb of Saint Cerbone, patron saint of Massa Marittima, and the identity of the patrons of the Marian frescoes in the rural hermitage of San Leonardo al Lago, the author deepens our insight into the origins and meanings of Sienese art production of the late medieval period.