Duccio di buoninsegna biography template

Biography

Duccio di Buoninsegna was the first great Sienese painter, and he stands in relation to the Sienese School as Giotto does to the Florentine; yet without the powerful naturalism that makes the art of Giotto so revolutionary.

Rather, Duccio sums up the grave and austere beauty of centuries of Byzantine tradition and infuses it with a breath of the new humanity which was being spread by the new Orders of SS. Francis and Dominic.

Duccio is first recorded in 1278 and 1279, working for the Commune, and then in 1280 he was heavily fined for an unspecified offence, probably political: it was the first of many fines to be inflicted on him, but the others were all much smaller.

In 1285 a large Madonna was ordered from him for the Florentine church of Sta Maria Novella: this was almost certainly the Rucellai Madonna (now in the Uffizi), but the picture is sometimes called a work of the 'Master of the Rucellai Madonna', and Vasari, in one of his patriotic moods, ascribed it to t