The Featured Researcher for June- July 2024 was Cecilia Mazzocchio, with a project title, ‘Siena and the Wider World: Reframing the City’s Art Through Global Exchanges (1300 – 1492)’
HEIs: University of St. Andrews, School of Art History
Supervisors: Dr Francesca Borgo & Prof Kathryn Rudy
I am a fourth-year PhD researcher in the history of art at St Andrews University. My doctoral project looks at fourteenth and fifteenth-century Siena, which is also my hometown in Italy. Within this chronology, I am interested in how ‘otherness’ was visualised and understood in Sienese art, in a time that precedes the Atlantic slave trade and the colonisation of the Americas (1300-1492).
Despite having a highly creative and impactful artistic school in its own right, Siena is predominantly framed by scholarship and exhibitions through qualitative comparison to its neighbour and rival Florence. As a result of this approach, Sienese works have taken second place to Florentine art, which instead, ever since Vasari’s Lives of the Artists (1550), has become and continues to be ‘the gold standard’ for Italian Renaissance art.
A view of Siena’s main square, Piazza del Campo, and its iconic town hall tower: Torre del Mangia. Image Credit: Unsplash
My thesis breaks from this localised and reductive approach to Sienese art. Instead, by placing Siena at the centre of the map, I examine the city’s connections with cultures far beyond Tuscany or Italy. By looking at Siena’s diplomatic and mercantile relations with the Mongol Empire during the fourteenth century and with Sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth, I seek to determine the city’s perception of a rapidly expanding world.
Through the examination of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Martyrdom of the Franciscans (c.1340), one of the most renowned depictions of Mongols characters in Sienese and Italian art alike, my first chapter traces the city’s knowledge of the Mongol Empire acquired through Franciscan missionary efforts.
Detail of a Mongol court in Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Martyrdom of the Franciscans, 1320-45, San Francesco, Siena. Image Credit: Creative Commons, Wikipedia
The second chapter delves deeper into the representation of Mongol identity by looking at the iconography of the Adoration of the Magi. In recent years, this subject matter has been at the centre of global art history and critical race theory debates because of Balthazar, one of the three Magi, who begins appearing as a Black African king in Northern European Adorations during the fifteenth century. However, the inclusion of Mongol elements in the same iconography, which, I argue is a specific Sienese fourteenth-century phenomenon, has received virtually no attention. I thus proceed to address this gap in the literature. My third and final chapter moves into the fifteenth century and examines the representation of two Sub-Saharan African figures in the marble intarsia pavement of the Sienese cathedral: the Libyan Sibyl and the African Soldier in the Story of Jephthah. The entirety of the cathedral marble floor is made of locally sources Sienese marbles, and the serpentine, which colours black the skin of the Libyan Sibyl and the African Soldier, is no exception. Here, I examine the tension between near and far, sameness and otherness as embodied by the very materials that make up this depiction of Africaness.
All in all, seeking to determine the grounds on which difference was established, if at all, my study hopes to contribute to a new global scholarship, as well as new interpretative pathways to Sienese heritage and history.
‘Guidoccio Cozzarelli, Libyan Sibyl’, 1482-83, marble inlay, left aisle Siena Cathedral. Image Credit: Creative Commons, Wikipedia
