Rinaldo da Siena
Rinaldo da Siena, identified by modern scholarship with the anonymous convention-name Maestro delle Clarisse, stands as one of the most enigmatic and significant painters and manuscript illuminators of thirteenth-century Tuscany. Active in Siena between approximately 1260 and 1281, he represents a critical transitional figure in the development of central Italian painting: an artist rooted in the Byzantine tradition who nonetheless absorbed the humanizing reforms of Coppo di Marcovaldo and anticipated the formal innovations that Duccio di Buoninsegna would later canonize.
Family and Social Origins
The precise date and place of birth of Rinaldo da Siena remain entirely unknown to scholarship, a circumstance that is not unusual for an artist of his period and social standing. The documentary record preserves his name in Latin as Ranaldus pittor de Senis, a formulation that confirms his origin within the city of Siena itself or at the very least his professional identity as a Sienese craftsman. In the thirteenth century, Siena was a thriving mercantile republic whose civic culture fostered the patronage of devotional art on a remarkable scale, and it is within this urban environment that Rinaldo’s family would have been embedded. No direct evidence survives regarding his parentage, siblings, or domestic circumstances, and no notarial document has yet surfaced to identify his father’s name or profession.
It is reasonable to suppose, by analogy with other painters of the period, that Rinaldo was born into a family of modest artisanal status, perhaps with some prior connection to the trades that supported the production of pigments, gilding materials, or parchment. The name “Rinaldo” was current in thirteenth-century Tuscany among families of both urban and rural provenance, and carries no particular heraldic or aristocratic resonance that might indicate elevated social origins. The epithet de Senis — of Siena — used in the 1274 San Gimignano document, strongly suggests that he was a resident of the city by that date and likely a full member of its guild of craftsmen.
Medieval Sienese painters were not organized under a painters’ guild of their own at this period; instead, they often worked under broader craft associations or directly under ecclesiastical patronage, which may help explain the relatively informal documentary trail Rinaldo left behind. His identification as a pictor rather than a miniator in the civic records underscores that his primary professional identity was as a panel painter, even though modern scholarship has equally attributed to him a substantial corpus of manuscript illumination. His death is recorded simply as having occurred within the thirteenth century, with no precise date or cause documented; it is generally assumed that he did not survive long past his last documented payment in 1281, suggesting a career that concluded before the decade’s end.
Patrons and Commissions
The patronage network of Rinaldo da Siena reveals a distinctive blend of civic, monastic, and — unusually — Florentine ecclesiastical clients, all of whom sought his services for different but complementary devotional and administrative purposes. The earliest documented commission comes from the Comune of San Gimignano, which in 1274 paid a Ranaldus pittor de Senis for a fresco of a defamatory nature (pittura infamante) depicting the murder of one Schiavo Paltone at the hands of his brother Nanza, painted on the external wall of the town’s principal church. The use of an artist of Rinaldo’s caliber for a pittura infamante — a genre of public shaming image — demonstrates that even skilled panel painters could be engaged by civic authorities for morally charged political acts of visual justice, and that Rinaldo’s reputation had spread well beyond Siena by the 1270s.
The Comune dei Quindici of Siena — the municipality’s financial magistracy — emerges as his most consistent patron during the years 1277, 1278, and 1281, when it made multiple payments to him for the painting of biccherna covers, insignia plaques, and small votive shields. The Biccherna1 tablets were the painted wooden covers of the Sienese treasury’s account books, and their commissioning was a prestigious undertaking that the commune reserved for leading painters of the day; their survival in documentary records constitutes the most reliable archival anchor for Rinaldo’s biography.
Among these, the tablet depicting Don Bartolomeo Alessi, monk of San Galgano, datable to July–December 1278, is the only biccherna cover attributable to him that has physically survived, and is currently preserved in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. The Cistercian Abbey of San Galgano — a prestigious Burgundian foundation in the Sienese contado — appears twice in the documents connected to Rinaldo, indicating that the great monastic establishments of the region constituted another important category of patron.
The religious community of the Poor Clares2 (Clarisse) of Siena provided the institutional context for the most important devotional panel attributed to him: the Cristo e la Vergine in trono, which gave rise to his conventional designation as the Maestro delle Clarisse. The attribution was first systematized by Edward B. Garrison in 1949, refined by James H. Stubblebine in 1964, and definitively associated with the historical name “Rinaldo” by Luciano Bellosi in 1991, building on an earlier intuition by Miklós Boskovits in 1985. Recent scholarship has significantly expanded Rinaldo’s Florentine patronage by attributing to him two liturgical manuscripts produced for religious communities in Florence as early as the 1270s — a finding that predates by over a decade the conventionally assumed beginning of Sienese artistic presence in Florence with Duccio’s Rucellai Madonna of 1285. One of these manuscripts was produced for the Franciscan basilica of Santa Croce in Florence, demonstrating that Rinaldo’s activity crossed the political boundaries between the rival communes of Siena and Florence during a period of acute inter-urban tension. Beyond the institutional patrons, the commission of the Livre du Gouvernement des princes illuminations preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France suggests that by the 1280s, Rinaldo’s atelier was capable of producing luxury books for sophisticated courtly or ecclesiastical audiences whose tastes extended to French vernacular literature.
Painting Style
The painting style of Rinaldo da Siena is rooted in the fully Byzantine visual vocabulary that dominated Sienese art of the mid-to-late thirteenth century, yet it is characterized by a softening and refinement of that inheritance that sets him apart from more strictly hieratic contemporaries. His figures are rendered with elongated proportions typical of Byzantine formal conventions, but the elongation is tempered by a certain suppleness of contour that prevents the schematic rigidity one encounters in cruder provincial adaptations of the maniera greca.
The faces in his panels exhibit a distinctive physiognomic vocabulary: slightly oblong skulls, particularly in feminine figures; drooping eyelids that convey meditative introspection rather than iconic fixity; swallow-wing moustaches in male faces; fleshy chins; and broad jaws in adult male figures, all contributing to a recognizable stylistic signature. His palette departs measurably from the bold, primary tonalities favored by Byzantine practitioners of the Lucchese or Pisan traditions; instead, Rinaldo employs soft, restrained hues — muted ochres, quiet carmines, and delicate greens — that lend his works an atmosphere of refined, almost lyrical devotion.
In the surviving biccherna tablet, the brushwork is notably thin and fluid, reflecting a sensibility cultivated also in his work as an illuminator, where the fine pen-line and the miniaturist’s need for precision directly influenced his panel technique. The use of gold ground remains consistent throughout his surviving work, serving not merely as a conventional backdrop but as an active element that dematerializes the figures and elevates them into the timeless sphere of sacred vision, a function deeply congruent with the theological purposes of devotional imagery in the mendicant and Cistercian contexts in which his works circulated.
In manuscript illumination, Rinaldo demonstrates a particular mastery of inhabited and historiated initials; the Getty Museum’s Iniziale G con san Francesco che riceve le stimmate (c. 1285) reveals his ability to organize complex narrative action within the cramped geometry of a single decorative letter. His handling of drapery reflects a cautious but perceptible departure from the strict network of golden highlights (chrysography) that defined Byzantine cloth-rendering; instead, he introduces a more organic fall of fabric that, while still highly stylized, begins to suggest the weight and volume of textile.
The Fondazione CR Firenze’s Madonna col Bambino attributed to him shows a notable advance in the rendering of the Christ Child, who — despite still being conceived as a small sage in the Byzantine manner — is depicted embracing his mother with a gesture of natural affection, signaling a nascent empathy with the humanity of the sacred figures that would become central to the reformist aesthetic championed by Franciscanism. Across his entire surviving corpus, one observes a consistent and deliberate effort to introduce emotional warmth and human approachability into an iconographic system that had, by its Byzantine origins, been designed to resist precisely such individualization — a tension that makes Rinaldo’s work a fascinating laboratory for the early history of Italian humanistic art.
Artistic Influences
The primary artistic influence on Rinaldo da Siena was the Byzantine tradition as it had been transmitted to central Italy through the commerce of painted panels, imported icons, and the work of Greek and Byzantine-trained craftsmen active in Tuscany during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This tradition provided him with his formal vocabulary of gold grounds, frontal hieratic poses, chrysography in drapery, and the severe typology of sacred faces — all the elements that constituted the shared visual language of Sienese devotional art before Duccio. Of particular importance among his Italian contemporaries was the Florentine painter Coppo di Marcovaldo, documented between 1260 and 1276, whose work in Siena — most notably the Madonna del Bordone painted for Santa Maria dei Servi during Coppo’s captivity following the Sienese victory at Montaperti in 1260 — introduced to Siena a more plastic and volumetrically ambitious interpretation of Byzantine formal types.
Rinaldo absorbed from Coppo’s example the possibility of inflecting the inherited Byzantine scheme with a greater sense of physical presence and emotional immediacy, an influence perceptible in the more naturalistic rendering of faces and the softer handling of form in his mature works. Cimabue, the great Florentine reformer of the Duecento, represents a more indirect influence, reaching Rinaldo through the mediation of the broader Sienese-Florentine artistic interchange rather than through any direct documented contact. The impact of Cimabue’s radical reinterpretation of Byzantine pictorial conventions — particularly his willingness to introduce spatial recession, three-dimensional drapery, and expressive intensity into sacred figures — percolated into Sienese workshops of the 1270s and 1280s and can be read in Rinaldo’s later works as a gentle but unmistakable pressure toward formal innovation.
The Franciscan3 spiritual reform was not merely a theological but also a profoundly aesthetic movement; its insistence on the humanity of Christ and the affective engagement of the faithful with the image of the suffering Savior created a new kind of patron who wanted images that spoke to the heart as well as the intellect, and this pressure shaped the direction of Rinaldo’s stylistic evolution. Sienese painting of the period was also influenced by the Pisan tradition, and the close artistic interchange between the two cities — documented in the shared circulation of painted panels and the movement of craftsmen — is reflected in certain structural features of Rinaldo’s Crocifissi that recall Pisan models. The strong devotional culture of the Cistercian4 and mendicant orders for whom Rinaldo worked was itself a shaping influence on his style, since the liturgical functions of his works — from the biccherna tablets to the choir manuscripts — required an art that was simultaneously beautiful, legible, and spiritually efficacious within specific contexts of monastic use.
Travels and Geographic Activity
Rinaldo da Siena’s documented activity implies a degree of geographic mobility that, while not exceptional by the standards of thirteenth-century Italian craftsmen, demonstrates that his reputation extended well beyond the walls of his native city. The earliest firm piece of evidence for travel outside Siena is the 1274 San Gimignano payment, which records that the Comune of that fortified hilltop town engaged a Ranaldus pittor de Senis for the execution of a defamatory mural on the external wall of the pieve, indicating that Rinaldo had traveled the approximately twenty kilometers southwest to San Gimignano — possibly responding to a specific civic commission rather than maintaining a permanent workshop there.
The attribution of two liturgical manuscripts to his workshop for Florentine religious communities during the 1270s implies that his atelier either traveled to Florence or maintained sufficiently close commercial ties with Florentine monasteries to receive and execute important commissions at a time when political relations between Siena and Florence were deeply unstable. Such cross-communal movement was commercially risky but artistically enriching, and Rinaldo’s documented Florentine activity — predating Duccio’s famous commission for the Rucellai Madonna by at least a decade — positions him as a genuine pioneer of the Sienese artistic penetration of the Florentine market.
The manuscript now in Paris, the illuminations of the Livre du Gouvernement des princes preserved in the Bibliothèque nationale de France and datable to before 1285, raises the possibility — though it cannot be confirmed — that Rinaldo’s workshop was connected to the circulation of French-influenced courtly culture in Tuscany, perhaps through an intermediary commission from a clerical or mercantile patron with ties to the Angevin court or to the French ecclesiastical network in Italy. Whether this manuscript was produced in Siena for a patron who subsequently transported it to France, or whether it reached the Bibliothèque nationale through later dispersal of an Italian library, remains unresolved, but it testifies to the international dimensions of manuscript patronage in which Rinaldo participated.
Principal Works
Trittico della Madonna col Bambino, Crocifissione e Deposizione
The Triptych of the Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion, and the Deposition is one of the few surviving examples of a 13th-century Sienese portable triptych, combining three distinct narrative and devotional scenes on a single wooden panel, arranged according to the Byzantine-derived tradition of panel painting.
- Central Panel: Madonna and Child
The central panel is dominated by the figure of the Virgin Enthroned (Theotokos or Majesty), depicted in a frontal and solemn pose according to the Byzantine canon. Mary is wrapped in a large, dark maphorion (mantle)—tending toward blue-black—typical of 13th-century Sienese Marian iconography. The Bambino Gesù sits on her left arm, depicted not as an infant but as a small adult (puer senex), in accordance with the iconographic tradition that emphasizes Christ’s divine nature from birth. The Child holds a scroll or book in his left hand—a symbol of the Divine Word—and raises his right hand in a gesture of blessing. The background is entirely gilded—the so-called oro zecchino applied in leaf—which in medieval painting does not represent a physical setting but the uncreated light of God, eternal paradise. The composition is markedly symmetrical and two-dimensional, with the figures occupying all available space without perspective depth, faithful to the pre-Duccesque Sienese style.
- Left Side Panel: Crucifixion
The left panel depicts the Crucifixion of Christ (Crucifixion). Christ is depicted on the cross with his body beginning to yield to the weight, in a posture that marks the iconographic transition from the Christus Triumphans (Christ alive and regal on the cross) to the Christus Patiens (Christ suffering and dying), a fundamental transition in 13th-century painting. Christ’s body is covered by a white or red loincloth, tied at the lower abdomen; his head is tilted to one side, with his eyes closed, indicating death. On either side of the cross are the mourning figures: on the left, the Virgin Mary, wrapped in her dark mantle, in an attitude of profound grief; on the right, Saint John the Evangelist, the beloved disciple, holding the Gospel book. The figures are stylized, with clean contour lines and flat areas of color, in the Sienese manner that balances symbolic abstraction and emotional tension. The gold of the background enhances the sacred and otherworldly significance of the event.
- Right Side Panel: Deposition
The right panel depicts the Deposition from the Cross (Depositio or Lamentation over the Dead Christ), the scene immediately following the Crucifixion in the Passion cycle. Christ’s body is lowered from the cross or laid down, supported by devout figures. Typically appearing in this scene are Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who hold the lifeless body of Jesus, while the Virgin and the Marias (the pious women) assist with codified gestures of mourning: hands raised, faces veiled, heads bowed in sorrow. The composition is narrative and relatively dynamic compared to the solemn stillness of the central panel, with figures interacting with one another around the body of Christ, foreshadowing the emotional sensitivity that would find full expression in Duccio di Buoninsegna and later in Giovanni Pisano.
Christ and Mary on the throne
The work comes from the Franciscan convent of Santa Petronilla in Siena and embodies an extraordinary local devotional tradition.
- The “Madonna della Palla”
The work’s popular nickname dates back to a 16th-century tradition: the panel was displayed outdoors, under the convent’s canopy, when it was accidentally struck by a ball.
The mark left on the Virgin’s cheek was interpreted by the faithful as a miraculous bruise, and that trace is still visible today on the painted surface, conferring on the work an aura of sacredness that has increased popular veneration for centuries.
The scene depicts Christ and Mary seated on a throne, the backrest of which can be glimpsed on either side of the figures. The iconography is an updated variation of the traditional Hodegetria—literally “She Who Shows the Way”—in which, however, the context is not that of the Madonna and Child, but rather that of two adult figures side by side: the adult, blessing Christ and the Virgin pointing to him with her hand, in a gesture that directs the believer’s gaze toward the Son as the source of salvation. Christ holds a book in his left hand, a symbol of the Gospel and the Divine Word, although the paint in that area is largely worn away and difficult to read.
The panel has a large gap in the central section, which compromises the legibility of certain compositional details. Despite this, the two main figures remain recognizable in their essential features: the linear contours, the stylized faces of Byzantine derivation, and the drapery with its rigid, schematic folds. The background is entirely gilded—gold leaf applied over a bolus ground—in accordance with the 13th-century Sienese tradition that transforms the surface into a field of uncreated divine light.
Critics situate this work at a time when Sienese painting stood at the crossroads between the Italo-Byzantine tradition and the first steps toward a more humanized artistic language. Rinaldo da Siena was influenced by Cimabue, who, beginning in the 1270s, became the principal point of reference in the Sienese scene as well, while maintaining a formal vocabulary still tied to the harshness of the drawing and to Eastern stylizations.
At the same time, the work anticipates the emotional sensitivity and linear refinement that would find full expression in Duccio di Buoninsegna in the decades immediately following. The Zeri Foundation dates the work later, between approximately 1285 and 1295, suggesting that Rinaldo’s activity extended into the last quarter of the 13th century, within a documented timeframe spanning approximately 1274 to 1281.
Miniatures of the Mulomedicina of Vegetius
The Mulomedicina (or Digestorum Artis Mulomedicinae Libri) is a Latin treatise on equine veterinary medicine written by Publius Vegetius Renatus in the 4th–5th centuries AD, the same author of the famous De Re Militari. The work systematically discusses the diseases of horses and mules, their causes, symptoms, and remedies, organized into four books. It enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages, as the care of horses was essential for both warfare and the agricultural economy. The manuscript Plut. 45.16 is one of the most richly illustrated 14th-century copies of this text, and the presence of a skilled illuminator such as Rinaldo da Siena elevates it to an exceptional example of Sienese book production in the late 13th century.
The manuscript is written on parchment (membrana), the standard writing material for fine medieval codices, made from treated and scraped sheep or goatskin. The text is written in brown ink in Italian Gothic script from the late 13th century, with alternating red and blue decorated initials—the so-called litterae florissae—that mark the paragraphs of the treatise. The exact dimensions of the codex are not documented in the available digital sources, but manuscripts of this format produced in Siena in the third quarter of the 13th century typically measure around 280–320 × 190–220 mm for a full page, with the miniatures occupying varying spaces within the text column or spanning the entire page.
Rinaldo’s illustrations directly accompany the veterinary text with narrative scenes of a practical and didactic nature, entirely unusual for a painter trained in the tradition of Sienese sacred icons. Stylistically, the miniatures display the same formal vocabulary as Rinaldo’s sacred panels: figures with sharp, linear contours; drapery with rigid, schematic folds; faces with stylized features of Italo-Byzantine origin; and the use of flat colors—blue, red, ochre, green—without chiaroscuro variations. However, the nature of the text requires Rinaldo to adopt a visual register different from the devotional: the figures interact with one another in a functional manner, the gestures are practical and descriptive, and the presence of animals introduces a naturalistic element unprecedented in his panel works. This manuscript thus attests to the versatility of the Sienese illuminator, capable of moving between the hieratic solemnity of icons and the illustrative narrative of scientific texts, anticipating that curiosity about the natural world that would characterize 14th-century Italian Gothic illumination.
The Virgin and Child, 1265-68
The Virgin and Child at the National Gallery in London (inv. NG6576) is one of the earliest works in the museum’s entire collection, attributed to the Master of the Clarisse (possibly Rinaldo da Siena) and dated to around 1265–1268. It is a small panel painted in egg tempera on wood (possibly walnut), measuring 31.4 × 19.5 cm, most likely intended for private devotion—an object to be held in one’s hands or placed on a kneeler, not an altarpiece.
Its very small dimensions immediately define the work’s function: not a church altarpiece, but a portable devotional panel (imago devotionis), intended for individual prayer in a convent or domestic setting. The wooden support, likely walnut as the attribution suggests, is prepared with a layer of chalk and glue (fine and coarse chalk) onto which the gold leaf for the background is applied, followed by egg tempera, a medium typical of 13th-century Sienese painting. The elongated vertical format concentrates the two figures within a narrow, intimate space, which facilitates close visual contact between the devotee and the sacred images. Mary occupies the central and dominant part of the composition, depicted full-length or in half-length according to the Italo-Byzantine tradition.
She is wrapped in the traditional maphorion, the dark, almost black-blue cloak—which covers her head and shoulders, allowing a glimpse of the red or purple robe beneath. The Virgin’s face is stylized according to Greek canons: an elongated oval, almond-shaped eyes with heavy eyelids, a slender, straight nose, a small, tightly closed mouth, and skin tones tending toward golden ochre. Her head is slightly tilted toward the Child, in a gesture of restrained tenderness that introduces a note of humanity even within the still rigidly solemn framework.
The Bambino Gesù is depicted in the style of the puer senex, the infant who has the body of a child but the face and demeanor of an adult, a symbol of his divine nature pre-existing his birth. He holds a scroll or book (the Divine Word) in his left hand and raises his right hand in a gesture of blessing with his fingers arranged in the Latin style (benedictio latina). The National Gallery notes that the combination of images in this panel is rare, and that the work may derive from a Byzantine (Eastern Christian) prototype. This suggests that Rinaldo is not simply repeating a local Sienese model, but is drawing on an Eastern iconographic archetype, perhaps mediated by imported icons or models circulating in southern Italy and the Adriatic region.
The style is fully attributable to the Sienese manner of the third quarter of the 13th century: clean, calligraphic contour lines; flat fields of color without chiaroscuro variations; gold leaf in the background that eliminates any sense of spatial depth and transforms the surface into a field of uncreated sacred light. The folds of the drapery follow abstract, repetitive patterns, with angular or V-shaped lines derived directly from the Constantinopolitan painting tradition filtered through Sicilian mosaics and the painting of Cimabue. Compared to the panels by Guido da Siena, with whom Rinaldo shares commissions and formal vocabulary, this small work displays a graphic quality of particular finesse, which can also be explained by its small size: painting on such a small surface requires a precise hand and a highly calibrated brushstroke.
The work is one of the oldest in the National Gallery, and its presence in London bears witness to the dispersal of medieval Sienese artistic heritage that occurred between the 18th and 19th centuries, when the European antiquities market absorbed many small 13th-century panels from suppressed convents or private Tuscan collections. The fact that the National Gallery attributes it to the Master of the Clarisse (possibly Rinaldo da Siena) reflects the philological caution still required regarding this painter: the identification of the two names is accepted by prevailing critical opinion, but is not supported by direct documentation linking the master’s hand to this specific panel.
Madonna and Child with Four Saints
The dossale (from the Latin dorsum, “back”) is a type of painted panel placed vertically on the altar table, between the altar itself and the celebrant, or immediately behind it—a function distinct from that of the paliotto, which covers the front of the altar. The elongated horizontal format—nearly twice as wide as it is tall—is characteristic of Sienese altarpieces from the late 13th century, where the central figure of the Madonna is flanked by saints in separate compartments or within a single continuous field. The work entered American collections through a donation from the Samuel H. Kress Collection in 1961 (accession number 61.21).
The central panel is dominated by the enthroned Madonna (Theotokos), seated on a throne with a backrest and armrests, wrapped in the traditional dark maphorion. The Bambino Gesù is held on his mother’s left arm, depicted in the puer senex style with his right hand raised in a gesture of blessing and his left hand holding a scroll or book. The throne, rendered with geometric lines and simple architectural decorations, creates a symmetrical framework around the Marian figure, emphasizing her hierarchical centrality within the entire composition. The background is entirely gilded with gold leaf, in accordance with the tradition that transforms gold into uncreated divine light.
On either side of the Madonna are four saints, two on each side, recognizable by their codified iconographic attributes. In the style of contemporary Sienese altarpieces—such as those by Guido da Siena or Guido di Graziano—the saints are depicted in a frontal and solemn pose, each occupying a compartment defined by architectural frames or simple gilded bands. The figures are elongated and stylized according to Rinaldo’s typical vocabulary: slightly oblong skulls, particularly in the female figures, swallow-winged mustaches and fleshy chins in the male faces, drooping eyes, and a boyish appearance.
The technique is tempera on panel, with a gold-leaf ground applied over a preparation of gesso and bolus. Compared to Rinaldo’s earlier works—such as the small London diptych from 1265–68—the Memphis Altarpiece demonstrates greater compositional mastery in the organization of a broad horizontal space, with figures that must be legible from a greater distance.
The color fields remain flat, the outlines linear and sharp, the faces stylized according to the Italo-Byzantine tradition, but the monumental composition of the central Madonna foreshadows the solutions Duccio would adopt in the Maestà of the Siena Cathedral (1308–1311), where the Virgin on the throne surrounded by saints and angels becomes the dominant theme of the great Sienese altarpiece.
Tavoletta di Biccherna di Don Bartolomeo Alessi, Monaco di San Galgano, camarlingo
This is one of the very few documented works by this artist, commissioned by the City of Siena for the period July–December 1278, and depicts Don Bartolomeo de Alexis (or Alessi), a monk of the Cistercian Abbey of San Galgano, in his role as treasurer of the Sienese Biccherna.
The Biccherna panels originated as painted covers for the accounting ledgers of the financial office of the Municipality of Siena (the “Biccherna”), on the initiative of Friar Ugo, treasurer in 1258. Tradition dictated that the incumbent treasurer be portrayed seated at his desk performing his duties, thus creating a document that was both administrative and artistic. Over time, to preserve these paintings—which were gaining artistic value—from the wear and tear of daily use, artists began painting the scenes on separate panels to be hung on the office walls as a permanent memento.
The Berlin panel follows the canonical iconographic model of 14th-century biccherne: the monk and treasurer Don Bartolomeo Alessi is likely depicted seated at his desk, in the act of performing his administrative duties, with the typical attributes of the office. The presence of a Cistercian monk from San Galgano—an abbey then among the most influential in Tuscany—as treasurer of the Biccherna reflects the close relationship between that monastic community and the financial management of the Municipality of Siena in the 13th century.
Rinaldo’s style belongs to a phase that is still fully Byzantine, yet open to the innovations introduced by the Florentine Coppo di Marcovaldo and capable of incorporating influences filtered through Cimabue. In the Berlin panel, one perceives a subtle and softened line, with a palette enriched by soft and delicate colors compared to the primary hues of the more orthodox Byzantine painters.
The figures display Rinaldo’s characteristic stylistic traits: elongated forms, slightly oblong skulls, “swallow-wing” mustaches, fleshy chins, broad jaws in the male faces, and a generally boyish appearance, with eyes that have a gently drooping expression.
It is worth noting that there is also a companion tablet depicting the same Don Bartolomeo Alessi for the January–June 1276 semester, preserved in the Siena State Archives (no. 6), which is also attributed to Rinaldo. The two tablets thus document the continuous presence of the same chamberlain over several semesters, a circumstance not uncommon in the Sienese administration of the 13th century.
The Virgin and Child
The painting, which is part of the Fondazione CR Firenze collection, dates to the second half of the 13th century. It is executed in tempera on wood and depicts the Madonna and Child according to the iconographic model of the Byzantine-derived Hodegetria.
The Virgin is depicted in full face, with a full-cheeked face and elongated features typical of the Greek-Byzantine style, framed by a soft white veil whose folds fall over her shoulders with a plasticity already leaning toward a new naturalism. Her robe is dark red, with gold decorations at the neckline and cuffs, while the dark blue cloak echoes traditional Marian iconography. The background is gilded, with punched decorations creating a spiral pattern in the circular halo around the figures—a characteristic element of 13th-century Sienese painting.
The Christ Child, while retaining the features of a little sage typical of the Byzantine tradition—with a mature face and gaze directed at the viewer—embraces his mother with a natural and relaxed gesture, a sign of the humanization of figures that was transforming Italian painting under the influence of Cimabue and the Franciscan spiritual renewal. He is wrapped in a pink cloak with golden highlights applied in radial brushstrokes, displaying great chromatic refinement. This affective detail distinguishes the work from the hieratic rigidity of more archaic icons.
Rinaldo da Siena belongs to a phase of Tuscan painting that is still fully Byzantine, yet open to the innovations brought by Coppo di Marcovaldo and the influences filtered through Cimabue. His work belongs to the generation of Sienese painters preceding Duccio di Buoninsegna, who developed a transitional style: the brushwork is subtle and softened, and the palette expanded with soft, delicate colors compared to the primary hues of purely Byzantine painters. This panel from the Fondazione CR Firenze is part of the collection’s thematic section “Giotto and Gold-Ground Paintings”, which brings together 13th- and 14th-century works on gold ground from the Tuscan region.
The Crucified Christ with the Sorrowing Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist, and the Prophets
The panel, composed of several wooden planks joined together, features a cornice, a base, side panels, and square finials at the four ends of the cross. The frame is carved in relief and slightly protrudes from the painted surface. The work comes from the Convent of San Girolamo in San Gimignano.
Christ is depicted according to the iconographic type of the Christus patiens—the dead and suffering Christ of the Eastern/Byzantine tradition—as opposed to the older Christus triumphans. The body is suspended from the cross by only two nails (one for each foot, according to the pre-Giottesque style), and the emaciated face bears the physical marks of the crucifixion: eyes closed as in a funeral mask, features relaxed by death, head tilted to the right. The body is covered only by a red loincloth, tied around the lower abdomen, and displays bleeding wounds on the hands, feet, and side. The head is surmounted by a golden halo decorated with vine branches and leaves and by a three-armed cross on a red background, embellished with three semi-precious stones (rock crystals) set in a laminated metal mount.
On either side of Christ’s body, directly on the side panels (tabellone) of the cross shaft, are depicted the two figures of the Gospel Sorrows: the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Evangelist. Both are depicted in a posture of mourning (dolenti), with bent bodies and restrained gestures typical of the Byzantine style, which prioritizes internalized sadness over dramatic expressiveness.
These two figures represent the witnesses par excellence of the Passion, as prescribed by the Gospel of John (19:25–27), and their presence lends the work an intense narrative and devotional significance. At the horizontal ends of the crossbeam—on the right and left panels—are depicted two Prophets, identifiable as Isaiah and Jeremiah. Their presence is typical of 13th-century Tuscan painted crosses: the Old Testament prophets who had foretold the Passion of the Messiah are placed alongside the Crucifixion to emphasize the fulfillment of the scriptural prophecy. The figures are set within quadrangular panels at the two horizontal ends of the cross, following the compositional scheme established in the Sienese and Pisan schools of the 13th century.
At the top of the cross, above the inscription IESUS HOMINUM NAZARENUS REX IUDAEORUM (the titulus crucis in Latin capital letters), a blessing Christ appears within a clipeus—a circular medallion—following an iconographic formula common in Tuscan painted crosses. This image of the triumphant and glorious Christ in the finial serves as a theological counterpoint to the figure of the dead Christ at the center: it is the declaration of divinity that transcends death, the passage from the Passion to Redemption.
The work reflects Rinaldo da Siena’s training within the tradition of pre-Ducal Sienese painting, with Byzantine influences clearly evident in the hierarchical rigidity of the figures, the use of a gold ground, the codified gestures of grief, and the stylization of the drapery. Compared to contemporary Pisan crucifixes (such as those by Giunta Pisano), the panel from San Gimignano displays a more intimate and linear sensibility, a quality that characterizes the entire oeuvre of this master, whose work is also documented as an illuminator as well as a panel painter.
The Descent from the Cross
The crypt of Siena Cathedral is an extraordinary discovery: buried for nearly six centuries after being filled with debris in the 14th century, it was rediscovered only in 1999 during restoration work. Thanks to this prolonged sealing, the approximately 180 square meters of frescoed surface have been preserved with colors of extraordinary brilliance, making the cycle a unicum virtually without equal in the history of medieval art. The frescoes are distributed across two registers: the upper one dedicated to the Old Testament, the lower one to the New Testament.
The fresco depicts the moment when Christ’s body, freshly removed from the cross, is supported and carried downward by a group of mourning figures. At the center of the composition stands the lifeless body of Christ—elongated, with the olive-green hue typical of the Byzantine tradition—sliding into the arms of those who support him. A wooden staircase, clearly visible in the center, punctuates the space and serves as a narrative element that still connects Jesus’ mortal body to the cross from which it comes.
On either side are the mourning figures, wrapped in loose reddish and orange robes that create a vivid contrast with the deep blue background—the typical ultramarine color of 13th-century Sienese painting. Some figures wear golden halos, identifying sacred figures such as the Virgin Mary, Saint John the Evangelist, and other Marys. In the lower right, a kneeling figure—probably Nicodemus or Joseph of Arimathea—is intent on removing a nail from Christ’s foot with a pair of tongs, a precise and poignant iconographic detail.
Rinaldo’s style belongs to a phase that is still fully Byzantine, yet already open to the innovations introduced by Coppo di Marcovaldo (a Florentine painter) and capable of incorporating influences filtered through Cimabue. This means that, while maintaining the solemnity and hieratic frontality of the Greek tradition, the figures display a certain new expressive tension: the faces betray pain, the hands twist in a gesture of lamentation, and the drapery, though not yet fully naturalistic, possesses a fluidity that anticipates the great era of the Sienese school with Duccio di Buoninsegna.
The Deposition was the focal scene of the space: it was the first image one saw upon entering the crypt from the main staircase, constituting the central devotional hub of this space, likely a vestibule for access to the cathedral or an antechamber to the confessional. The complete cycle of the Passion—comprising the Crucifixion, Deposition, and Burial of Christ—was thus experienced as a meditative sequence, almost a visual Via Sacra, by the fourteenth-century faithful before the space was closed off.
Initial G: The Stigmatization of St. Francis
The scene depicts one of the most significant episodes in the life of Francis of Assisi: the reception of the stigmata on Mount La Verna in Tuscany, which took place around September 14, 1224, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. According to St. Bonaventure, Francis had a vision of Christ Crucified in the form of a six-winged seraphim, from whom he received the five wounds of Christ on his hands, feet, and side. This miracle was decisive for the saint’s rapid canonization, which took place as early as 1228 by Pope Gregory IX, just two years after his death in 1226.
Following Francis’s canonization, images of the Stigmatization spread rapidly throughout Italy, appearing in illuminated manuscripts, painted panels, and fresco cycles. The illuminated letter “G” almost certainly belonged to a Franciscan gradual or antiphonary—a liturgical choral book—where the letter began an antiphon or responsory linked to the feast of the Stigmatization (September 17) or that of the saint (October 4). The inclusion of the narrative scene within the letter itself is a technique typical of 13th-century Italian miniature painting, which blends calligraphic, devotional, and didactic functions.
The work fully reflects the language of Sienese painting from the third quarter of the 13th century, still heavily indebted to the Byzantine tradition but already moving toward greater narrative vitality. The use of tempera and gold leaf on parchment gives the miniature that sacred luminosity typical of the liturgical codices of the era. The gold leaf, applied as a background or to specific elements such as the halo and the seraphim, transforms physical light into divine light, according to a theological principle deeply rooted in medieval iconographic tradition. The dating to around 1275 places Rinaldo’s work at a crucial moment for Italian miniature painting, just a few decades after the young Duccio di Buoninsegna began his career, with whom he shared the Sienese cultural milieu.
Miniatures of the Livre du Gouvernement des princes
The manuscript is housed at the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris under the call number ms. Italien 233 (BnF, It. 233). In addition to the vernacular translation of Egidio Romano’s (Gilles de Rome) De regimine principum, the manuscript also contains a rare Arezzo vernacular version of St. Thomas Aquinas’s De regno ad regem Cypri, making it a codex of extraordinary philological and historical-artistic interest. The De regimine principum was composed by Egidio Romano between 1277 and 1282, when the Augustinian theologian was tutor to the future Philip IV of France.
The Livre du gouvernement des princes belongs to the literary genre of the speculum principis (or “mirror of princes”), texts on political and moral education intended for the instruction of the children of kings and high-ranking nobility.
The work is structured in three books: the government of oneself, the government of the family, and the government of the kingdom. The treatise enjoyed extraordinary circulation in the late Middle Ages, with over 300 known copies in both Latin and the vernacular.
The miniatures in ms. It. 233 are attributed by art historians to Rinaldo da Siena, identified with the so-called Master of the Poor Clares. The images appear in the form of elaborate historiated initials (initials decorated with narrative figures within the letters), characterized by gold-leaf backgrounds, vivid polychromy in blue, red, and green, and figures with stiff drapery still fully tied to the Byzantine tradition, but with some attempts at narrative animation typical of the Sienese workshop of the period.
The scenes depicted include figures of kings, philosophers, and prelates in positions of educational and political authority, consistent with the text’s content. The BnF’s Mandragore database attributes the manuscript to Tuscany (Italy), 13th–14th centuries, confirming the traditional dating to before 1285.
The manuscript is executed on parchment (parchemin), as was standard practice for luxury codices of the 13th century. The miniatures are executed in tempera and gold leaf on parchment, with the text organized in columns and ruled with lead—a codicological technique typical of 13th-century manuscripts produced in Italy and France.