HAIL MARYS AT THE SUPERNATURAL

Giotto turned the art of painting from Greek or Byzantine into latin and rendered it modern. Duccio brought the Byzantine style to a fresh late flowering, that stopped short of complete transition. Giotto’s achievement gave painting the direction it was to follow until the twentieth century. The finest of Duccio’s panels is probably The Three Mary’s at the Tomb, whereas Giotto’s consummate single expression is the Lamentation. The paintings are quite different and deserve to be discussed separately.

Duccio. The Three Marys At The Tomb. 1308-1311

Duccio’s Three Mary’s follows a pattern for the subject that had been laid down for centuries, but departs from it by using the old stage directions as the basis for a fully developed psychological drama. The existing Byzantine traditions are faithfully observed in a beautiful, but undramatic,  late twelth-century version of the scene in typical Italo-Byzantine style. The three Mary’s stand at the left bearing spices with which they had expected to anoint Christ’s body. The Angel, seated on the edge of the tomb, indicates, Christ has risen, and humanity has missed the hoped for rendez-vous. Duccio transforms this adequate charade into a drama. It is a moment too sacred to be treated as a melodrama. It must be invested with an air of miracle. We must know that we are in the presence of the supernatural, as are the three women who recoil slightly in the tense blank moment before realization.

”The subtlety of posture in the scene of the Three Marys at the Tomb is outstanding. The women are portrayed in attitudes of wonder and fear; their delicate backwards movement and gesticulating hands show their astonishment at the sudden apparition. For the design of the three figures it would seem that Duccio was inspired by the Sibyl carved by Giovanni Pisano on the facade of Siena Cathedral. Opposite, the angel is sitting quietly on the rolled-away stone and pointing to the empty tomb. His white robe (lighter than the shroud draped over the edge of the sarcophagus) wraps him in soft folds which show up well against the dark rocks and illuminate the whole composition.”

The Kiss of Judas:''The Mount of Olives becomes the scene of unexpected agitation in Christ Taken Prisoner, containing three separate episodes: in the centre the kiss of Judas, to the left Peter cutting off the ear of the servant Malchus, to the right the flight of the apostles. The dramatic intensity of the scene, heightened by the crowded succession of spears, lanterns and torches, shows in the excited movements of the characters and the expressiveness of their faces.''

Duccio forgoes the Bible narrative of the women  who ”fled from the sepulchre; for they trembled and were amazed”. The atmosphere of enchantment would have been obliterated if Duccio had chosen to portray a moment of panic, hysteria, agitation, fluttering robes and abandoned spice canisters. Instead, Duccio plays nice and the Marys stand huddled against the far edge of the frame, confused and troubled, while the angel, graceful and assured in unrestricted space, is a pattern of ample gestures and gently eddying draperies. The whiteness of his robe further isolates him from the group of women, where the color is intense and tightly bound. His halo is played like a sun at the apex of a triangle made by his wings and the shadowed area of the rocks; the rocks serving as device to crystallize this supernatural moment forever within a few square inches of colour and lines.

In Duccio’s Kiss of Judas, the artist shows that he could also control a wider stage and set a larger cast into a balanced dynamic pattern. Several things are going on such as Judas’s kiss of betrayal, Simon Peter cutting off the ear of one of Christ’s captors and the fleeing of other disciples. The actors are not as convincing in their attitudes and facial expressions as Duccio wants them to be, and the problem of movement in the scene remains unreconciled. But then, the problem of creating the illusion of continuous rapid movement in the painted figure would stump artists for another three centuries. What counts is Duccio creating an explicit expression of flight. Quite, ingeniously, The split takes the form of a widening V of landscape, emphatically marked by a tree driven like a spike into the wedge.

Duccio. Maesta. The Madonna is surrounded by thirty different saints and angels, and busts of the apostles appear in a frieze of small niches at the top of the painting.e

This split is not sufficient to create the impression of movement. The forward leaning of the figures, emphasized by the nearest figure of the main group leaning in the opposite direction, gives part of the desired effect. The primary effect of movement is produced by line; specifically the stretched lines of the backward floating drapery terminated by the fluttering, jagged, broken shape of the crevice in the hill above their heads.

”One’s vision is instantaneously arrested by the brilliance of Christ’s cloak. The startling blue of this garment speaks directly to our primordial imagination of the sky above–infinite, unknowable. Symbolically this is the divine infinitude, the virginal plenitude from whence Christ is born and which remains constant as the mysterious substratum of existence. Around this blue burns the gold rimming at once both sunrise and sunset, simultaneously setting ablaze the horizon. This golden “sun” is both the phenomenal sun that speaks of the daily cycle and also the Divine Sun that remains always the Centre, its rays–none other than the Holy Spirit–reaching out to pluck forth existence from the Divine Substance….Duccio uses ultra marine as the colour of Christ’s cloak; this pigment, reserved for the colour of the Virgin’s cloak,is made from ground lapis lazuli, which, as Mircea Eliade has remarked, is ‘the cosmic symbol above all others (the starry night)’; this then recalls the Maris Stella, and in turn, the association between the symbolism of the sea and the sky. This web of symbolic homologues works to reinforce the primarily efficaciousness of the chromatic nature of ultra marine, which absorbs light, and thus vision, creating a depth that the viewer disappears into like a drop into the ocean. In the final analysis it is the chromatic effect of Duccio’s colours that holds the key to their symbolism, which is firstly and foremost, the intuitive feeling they evoke.” ( Timothy Scott )

Duccio. Calling of Saint Peter and Saint Andrew