Agostino di Giovanni

Introduction: the problem of Agostino di Giovanni

Few figures of the Sienese Trecento illustrate so sharply the gap between fame and evidence as Agostino di Giovanni. For roughly three centuries after Giorgio Vasari¹ devoted a joint biography to “Agostino et Agnolo scultori et architetti sanesi,” Agostino enjoyed the reputation of a founding master of Sienese Gothic sculpture and architecture, credited with the design of Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico, with civic gates and towers, and even with feats of hydraulic engineering on the river Po. Modern documentary research has drastically reduced that reputation. The entry on Agostino in the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, written by Enzo Carli in 1960, opens by observing that Agostino “è ricordato con ampie, ma inattendibili notizie, dal Vasari, insieme con Agnolo di Ventura: dati sicuri sulla sua vita si possono invece desumere da documenti pervenutici” — he is recorded with extensive but unreliable notices by Vasari, and reliable facts about his life must instead be drawn from surviving documents. What remains, once the legendary accretions are stripped away, is a well-attested professional biography and a very small nucleus of secure works — above all one signed, dated monument — around which a much larger and much more contested body of attributions has accumulated.

This essay proceeds by a principle of epistemic layering, distinguishing firmly among three registers of claim. The first is what is documented: archival records, signatures, and inscriptions on monuments. The second is what is attributed: works assigned on stylistic grounds, with widely varying degrees of scholarly consensus. The third is what is traditional or legendary: chiefly Vasari’s narrative and its early-modern elaborations by later Sienese antiquarians. Keeping these registers distinct is not pedantry. It is the only responsible way to write about an artist whose modern reconstruction has depended precisely on the systematic separation of document from legend — an artist, moreover, who worked within a family workshop that makes even the attribution of unsigned works an exercise in relative probability rather than proof. The three modern voices most central and most authoritative in this literature — Carli, who set the sceptical documentary baseline in 1960; Roberto Bartalini, who reopened and enlarged the question from the 1980s onward; and Gert Kreytenberg, who redistributed works among the members of the family — will recur throughout, and it is largely through their disagreements that the shape of the problem becomes visible.

The documented biography

The documentary skeleton of Agostino’s life was assembled chiefly by the great Sienese archival compilations of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — the Documenti per la storia dell’arte senese published at Siena in 1854, and the supplementary Nuovi documenti per la storia dell’arte senese of 1898 — and it has been re-examined and refined by twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship, most systematically by Bartalini. The earliest secure notice dates from 11 September 1310 and concerns Agostino’s marriage to Lagina di Nese, from whom he had at least two sons, Giovanni and Domenico, both of whom became sculptors and architects. Because the marriage is the first documentary trace, and because Agostino must have been an established adult by then, scholars conventionally place his birth around 1285; but this is an inference, not a recorded date, and it should be held as such.

The name of Agostino’s own father, a “maestro Giovanni,” supplies his patronymic but tells us nothing certain about his training. Vasari’s claim that he was reared in the workshop of Giovanni Pisano is now generally rejected. The stylistic evidence points instead to the ambit of Camaino di Crescentino — the father of the far more famous Tino di Camaino — with whose manner Agostino shares the massive, squared, broadly planar treatment of volume that characterizes his securest works. This is a hypothesis of formation rather than a documented apprenticeship, and it is offered in the literature as such; but it accords with the visual evidence in a way that Vasari’s story does not.

From the late 1320s the documents thicken and locate Agostino within a dense network of Tuscan commissions, frequently in partnership. In 1329 the Commune of Siena compensated him for carrying a letter to Pier Saccone Tarlati at Arezzo; the payment records that Agostino “ivit ad dominum Petrum Sachonis,” an errand directly connected to the great Aretine commission that would follow. In 1330 he signed, with Agnolo di Ventura, the tomb of Bishop Guido Tarlati. In 1331 he is documented working on the vaults of the Palazzo comunale of Siena; a document of 10 June 1331 records that he, together with a maestro Rosso, received two hundred lire for the construction of vaults in the part of the palace where the Curia was accustomed to meet.

On 10 March 1332 he received, with his son Giovanni, a payment for work in the Ghini chapel in the Pieve di Santa Maria at Arezzo; on 7 February 1333 a further chapel in the same church was allotted to them. In 1336 he was engaged on the fortress — the cassero — that Siena was raising at the newly subjugated Massa Marittima, a Maremma town that had submitted to Sienese domination in 1335 and whose fortifications were completed by early 1337. In 1337 he travelled with Giovanni to Orvieto, where his son received a post connected to the cathedral works. In 1339 he held the civic office of Operaio della Torre del Comune at Siena, and in 1340 he undertook, with other masters, to bring water to the fountain in the Campo.

On 4 February 1340 (Sienese style), in partnership with maestro Agostino di maestro Rosso and maestro Cecco di maestro Casino, he contracted for the street-side façade of the Palazzo Sansedoni; a pen drawing survives at the head of the contract, preserved in the archive of the palace itself, now held in the archive of the Monte dei Paschi di Siena. On 23 March 1340 he consented formally to the appointment of his son Giovanni as capomaestro of the Opera del Duomo of Siena, promising his own counsel and assistance. Records from 1343 of purchases and sales of houses and land show that Agostino was then living in the Sienese popolo (parish) of San Quirico. He was dead by 27 June 1347, when Giovanni is designated “olim magistri Agostini” — the son of the late master Agostino.

Several features of this biography deserve emphasis. First, it is the biography of a versatile professional — a magister lapidum who was at once sculptor, building contractor, civic works official, and hydraulic engineer — and not of a specialized image-maker. The documents that mention him call him sometimes magister lapidum and sometimes simply operaio, that is, a kind of works-superintendent and paymaster. Second, it is a biography of partnerships: with Agnolo di Ventura, with his own sons, and with fellow Sienese masters such as Agostino di maestro Rosso — the “Agostino di Rosso” (or Agostino di Rosso di Grazia) with whom Agostino di Giovanni is so frequently and confusingly associated in the older literature, and who was himself an architect and hydraulic engineer. The two Agostini are distinct men, and the recurrence of the name is one of the minor traps of the subject. Third, the biography is emphatically that of a Sienese civic servant: the offices held, the fountain conduit, the city gates, the fortress at a subject town, and the water supply of the Campo all belong to the public building culture of Siena under the government of the Nine, the mercantile-banking oligarchy that governed the city from 1287 to 1355 and presided over its greatest age of monumental construction.

The two sons prolong and complicate the story. Giovanni d’Agostino, born shortly after 1310, was the more gifted sculptor of the family; he became capomaestro of the Sienese cathedral works from 1340 and probably died in the plague of 1348. His securest works — the chapel built in suffrage of a member of the Tarlati family in Arezzo Cathedral, contracted in January 1334, and the small signed relief of the Madonna and Child with Two Angels in the oratory of San Bernardino at Siena, which carries the subscription “Iohannes magistri Agostini de Senis me fecit” — furnish the touchstone for distinguishing his hand from his father’s. Domenico d’Agostino, whose birth date is unknown but who was already styled “maestro” by 1343, inherited the role of capomaestro of the Duomo, taking it up from 1350. The three — father and two sons — evidently operated within a single family workshop. This circumstance lies at the very heart of the attributional difficulties discussed below, for works produced within such a shop, on shared sites and in a shared idiom, resist confident assignment to a single hand.

The Tarlati monument: the one secure masterpiece

The funerary monument of Guido Tarlati, bishop and lord of Arezzo, in that city’s cathedral is the single fixed point of Agostino’s oeuvre: it is signed, it is dated, and it is documented. Its inscription reads

Hoc opus fecerunt magister Augustinus et magister Angelus de Senis MCCCXXX

a signature that names both masters as “de Senis,” of Siena, and dates the work to 1330. This is, as the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale observes, the first documented work of Agostino and the only one bearing his signature; everything else in his catalogue is attribution. The weight the monument must therefore bear in any reconstruction of his art can scarcely be overstated: it is at once his masterpiece and the sole documented yardstick against which every proposed addition to his oeuvre must be measured.

The historical circumstances are well established. Guido Tarlati of Pietramala², of the leading Ghibelline family of Arezzo, had been elevated to the see of Arezzo — his election confirmed by Pope Clement V in 1312 — and was made signore of the city in 1321, uniting spiritual and temporal lordship in a single, aggressively expansionist career. He died in 1327. His brothers, Pier Saccone and Dolfo (Delfo) Tarlati, commissioned the monument, summoning to Arezzo the two Sienese masters; the Sienese payment of 1329 for Agostino’s letter-carrying errand to Pier Saccone connects him directly to the negotiations, and the monument was complete by 1330.

The monument is a grand wall-tabernacle of imposing verticality. A tall cusped gable surmounts a wide niche — now empty, but once, it is generally believed, containing a statue of the bishop. Within the tabernacle lies the funerary chamber, opened at the front to reveal the recumbent effigy, flanked by angels drawing back curtains and by a company of officiants at the obsequies. Below, projecting from the wall on five great corbels without other support, runs the feature that made the monument famous: sixteen narrative relief panels, arranged in four tiers and interspersed with statuettes of the bishop, recounting the principal episodes of his career.

The inscriptions on the frames — probably re-cut at the end of the eighteenth century — identify the subjects in sequence: his elevation as bishop (by Clement V in 1313); his being called to the lordship (1321); the allegory of the “Comune pelato,” the “shorn commune”; the “Comune in signoria”; the building of Arezzo’s walls (1319); and then a sustained sequence of military actions — the surrender of Lucignano, the siege of Chiusi, the storming of Fronzola (1322), the taking of Castel Focognano, the conquest of Rondine (1323), the address after the capture of Bucine, the conquest of Caprese (1324), the razing of the walls of Laterina (1326), the destruction of Monte San Savino; then the coronation of Ludwig the Bavarian, which Tarlati performed in the cathedral of Milan on 16 June 1327; and finally the death of the bishop.

The iconographic programme is the monument’s most remarkable feature and its chief claim on modern attention. Here a bishop is celebrated not as a churchman but as a warrior-prince: the reliefs dwell almost entirely on his secular and military deeds, on castles taken, walls built and thrown down, armies mustered, and an emperor crowned. The programme is a frank exercise in dynastic and factional propaganda for the Tarlati — and hence for the Ghibelline cause — at the very moment of that cause’s local ascendancy.

The “Comune pelato” relief has drawn the most sustained study. An aged, bearded figure personifying the commune sits dejected upon a throne while figures representing the city’s rival factions shave and mock him: an allegory of the misgovernment of Tarlati’s predecessors and of the necessity of submitting to a single lord in order to escape the self-lacerating strife of communal politics.

It is generally accepted — Carli’s Dizionario Biografico entry states it plainly — that this allegory “trova riscontro in un perduto affresco di Giotto,” a lost Giotto composition described by Ghiberti³, by the Anonimo Gaddiano, and by Vasari, and traditionally located in the Palazzo del Podestà (the Bargello) in Florence. The direction of the borrowing is significant: the Aretine relief adapts a Florentine, Giottesque invention, but inverts its political meaning, for the Florentine allegory warned against tyranny while the Aretine one recommends lordship. This specific, limited iconographic debt is almost certainly the kernel of truth behind Vasari’s far larger and false claim that Giotto designed the whole tomb — a point to which we shall return.

The stylistic sources of the reliefs reach beyond Giotto. The narrative amplitude of the ensemble, its readiness to unfold whole campaigns across a wall in tier upon tier of small figures, has been related to the extended storytelling of Duccio’s Maestà in the Sienese cathedral; the evocation of landscapes, towers, and castellated hill-country recalls the topographical realism of Ambrogio Lorenzetti; and the linguistic base of the figures has been traced to the nexus of Tino di Camaino and Simone Martini. These are relationships of visual culture, inferred from the works themselves, rather than documented contacts, and they should be received as such. What they establish is that the Tarlati monument, for all the severity of its individual figures, was conceived within the most advanced currents of early-Trecento Tuscan art.

The monument’s later history is one of damage and clumsy repair, and it bears directly on any close reading of the surfaces. In 1341, when Pier Saccone and the Pietramaleschi were driven from Arezzo in the anti-Tarlati Guelf reaction that followed the city’s cession to Florence in 1337, the monument suffered a kind of damnatio memoriae: the statuettes of the bishop were decapitated. In 1783 the monument was transferred, on the order of Bishop Niccolò Marcacci, from the chapel of the Sacrament to a position near the sacristy door — later descriptions place it on a wall of the cathedral — and on that occasion the reliefs were restored and missing parts reintegrated. The heads of the flanking armed figures were re-carved in that campaign, and the present stucco reintegrations date from it. Any connoisseurial reading of the monument must therefore reckon at every point with substantial eighteenth-century intervention, a caution that has not always been observed in the older literature.

The division of hands between the two signatories is the monument’s central connoisseurial problem, and it has never been resolved to universal satisfaction. The first systematic attempt, made in a study of 1938, distinguished a “Master A” and a “Master B” and assigned to the first — probably to be identified with Agostino — the sculptures of the funerary-chamber zone together with a specific group of the narrative panels: the reliefs numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, 13, 14, 15, and 16, and part of numbers 6 and 11.

Later scholarship complicated this picture by proposing that the two sons, Giovanni and Domenico, may also have had a share, so that what the signature presents as a duet may in fact record the collective output of a workshop. Kreytenberg, for instance, has argued that Giovanni d’Agostino executed part of the left-hand relief of the obsequies and several of the narrative scenes — the “Comune pelato,” the “Comune in signoria,” “Castel Focognano,” “Rondine,” “Bucine,” and “Caprese.” The essential and sobering point, expressed with unusual bluntness in the older Anglophone literature, is that the work of the two masters cannot be clearly differentiated — a caution that applies, with even greater force, to almost every attributional argument in this artist’s catalogue.

A related and thornier problem attaches to Agnolo di Ventura himself. He is a shadowy figure whose very identity rests on an inference. The identification of the “magister Angelus de Senis” of the Tarlati inscription with a documented Sienese sculptor called Agnolo di Ventura was proposed in the nineteenth century and has been generally, though not universally, accepted; there is no documentary proof of it, and at least one authoritative twentieth-century voice registered reservations.

Recent scholarship has begun to give Agnolo a more independent profile — for example by connecting to him two sculptures in the Louvre associated with the funerary monument of Cardinal Matteo Orsini in Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome — but the effort to reconstruct his personality remains, in Bartalini’s own phrasing, no more than “una traccia,” a trace. For the essayist, the practical consequence is that “Agostino e Agnolo,” as a partnership, is far less firmly constituted than the confident pairing of the older literature would suggest: one of the two partners is documented and signs a securely dated work, while the other is a name attached to that same signature and to a body of hypothesis.

The attributed works: from the plausible to the rejected

Beyond the Tarlati tomb, Agostino’s oeuvre is entirely a matter of attribution, and the scholarship is best understood as a spectrum running from proposals with strong support to those now decisively rejected.

Annunciate Virgin

The most important modern addition to the secure end of the spectrum is a wooden sculpture: the polychrome Annunciate Virgin in the Museo Nazionale di San Matteo in Pisa. A cleaning in the mid-twentieth century revealed an inscription on the base recording the date 1321 and naming, in a much-discussed formula, an “Agustinus (c)hondam Giovanni” together with a “Stefanus Acolti,” both “de Se[nis].” The Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale treats this as a decisive acquisition for the reconstruction of Agostino’s career, identifying the statue as his earliest known work and one in which he already appears fully in command of his means, and using it to anchor a hypothetical catalogue that runs from the Pisan Annunciata through the Tarlati tomb to the Cino monument.

• Description

The Virgin stands in the moment of the angelic salutation, her body drawn into a gentle Gothic sway, her head turned sharply to her left as though the Gabriel who once completed the group — no companion angel survives with her — had just entered the room. The right hand rises to the breast in the canonical gesture of startled submission, while the left falls along the flank, fingers grazing the drapery; the seams visible at the shoulders and elbows betray the customary Trecento practice of carving the arms separately and joining them to the hollowed trunk.

What lends the figure its severe beauty is the almost geometric purity of its construction: the perfect oval of the face, the long cylindrical neck, the hair bound in smooth plaited bands, and the columnar body articulated by firm, tubular folds that descend unbroken from the high waist to the flaring hem. The polychromy, though abraded — the red of the gown now shows the wood grain through the ground, and only traces remain of the blue lining of the drapery — preserves the essential chromatic scheme and the delicately painted features that soften the abstraction of the carving.

The base carries the inscription with the date 1321 and the names of Agostino, son of the late Giovanni, and Stefano Accolti, both Sienese. Revealed by a modern cleaning, it made the statue the earliest dated point in Agostino di Giovanni’s career, and its synthetic modelling of volumes has been closely compared to the figures he would carve for the Tarlati monument a decade later; Stefano Accolti is generally thought to have been responsible for the polychromy.

There is, however, genuine scholarly disagreement here, and it must be reported honestly. Carli read the very excellence of the piece as an argument against Agostino’s authorship, preferring to interpret the names of Agostino and Stefano Accolti as those of patrons or donors rather than of the sculptors, and this reservation was echoed by at least one later student of Andrea and Nino Pisano. The disagreement is instructive precisely because it turns on a methodological question — whether a documented name incised on an object names its maker or its commissioner — that recurs throughout medieval art history and that cannot be settled by the object alone.

Funerary Monument of Cino dei Sinibaldi

Few Trecento tombs celebrate the life of the mind as candidly as this one. The monument honours not a bishop or a knight but a professor: Cino dei Sinibaldi, the jurist and Stilnovist poet, friend of Dante and teacher of Bartolus, who died in 1336/7. Its programme is accordingly built around the act of teaching, stated twice over. On the front of the sarcophagus, carried on foliate corbels, a continuous relief unfolds a university lecture: the master at his raised desk on the left, and before him two crowded benches of students — some bent over their books, some disputing, one turning to his neighbour — rendered with an almost documentary relish for the furniture and postures of the medieval schoolroom. Above, on the chest itself, the lesson is restated in the round: Cino sits enthroned in his cathedra beside a small columnar lectern, his right hand raised in the gesture of exposition, while four standing pupils, scrolls and books in hand, attend on either side. Two spiral colonnettes with acanthus capitals frame the group and carry a broad trilobed arch beneath a crocketed gable, its spandrels ornamented with rosettes — a light, airy canopy that turns the wall into a lecture hall. The humanist epigraph on the slab beneath, hailing Cino as an eminent interpreter of the law and praeceptor of Bartolus, is a later addition, as is the small plaque recording the twentieth-century recomposition of his remains.

The attributional history is itself a lesson in method. Vasari gave the tomb to Andrea Pisano; the commissioning documents — the allotment of 11 February 1337 and the final payment of 27 December 1339 — name Cellino di Nese, who is now understood to have been the contractor rather than the carver; and since the identification proposed in 1906, the greater part of the sculpture has been recognized as the work of Agostino di Giovanni, presumably carved in Siena, with a possible share for one of his sons in certain portions. The right hand of the seated Cino is a stucco restoration, and two flanking statues were removed at some point to the cathedral’s Museo Capitolare, so the ensemble is seen today slightly reduced from its original state.

The attribution to Agostino, of the greater part of the work, is now widely accepted, with the qualification that certain portions — a male figure once joined to Cino’s listeners, and an Annunciation group — may reflect the intervention of one of his sons, perhaps Domenico; the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale dates the tomb about 1337–1339 and places it securely within Agostino’s activity. Here the confusions are worth setting out plainly, because each has been repeated: the monument is not by Andrea Pisano (Vasari’s error); it is not by Cellino di Nese, who was the contractor and not the carver; and it is not, in the sense sometimes loosely stated, a work of Agnolo di Ventura. During its various relocations the group suffered mutilations — the right hand of the statue of Cino was broken and later restored in stucco — and two flanking statues were at some point removed to the cathedral’s Museo Capitolare, so that here too the modern viewer confronts an altered object.

Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (attr.)

The saint stands frontally, a compact, columnar presence entirely characteristic of the sculptor to whom the work is attributed. She wears the dress of the pious widow — the close wimple binding cheeks and chin, the long veil falling over the shoulders — beneath a heavy mantle that envelops the whole figure; the knotted cord that appears among the folds at her feet marks her as a Franciscan tertiary, the order’s most beloved lay saint. Her right hand, brought before the breast, cups a cluster of rounded forms, most naturally read as the bread of her charity — or as the roses of her famous miracle, the two attributes that Trecento iconography used almost interchangeably for the Landgravine of Thuringia, canonized in 1235. The left hand descends to gather the hem of the mantle, generating the deep diagonal cascade of folds that animates the figure’s right flank.

The carving displays exactly the qualities that scholarship has isolated as Agostino’s hallmark: the massive, broadly squared treatment of volume; the drapery organized into firm, tubular folds of almost architectural regularity rather than naturalistic flutter; the face conceived as a simplified, planar oval with heavy-lidded eyes and small, tight features, expressive less of psychological nuance than of a grave, hieratic stillness. The weight of the block is everywhere felt through the surface — the figure reads as a plastic volume set against space, not as a body moving through it — and it is precisely this conception of sculpture, faithful to the lesson of Tino di Camaino’s circle, that distinguishes the father’s manner from the more atmospheric, “pictorial” style developed by his son Giovanni d’Agostino.

Saint Francis (attr.)

The founder of the Friars Minor is presented with the utmost economy of means: a standing, block-like figure in the habit of his order, the cowl lying in heavy folds about the shoulders, the tunic bloused over the knotted cord that falls in a long vertical down the centre of the body — its knots, the visible sign of the vows, carved with almost diagrammatic care. The bare feet emerging from beneath the hem complete the iconography of evangelical poverty. In his left hand Francis clasps a book, the Rule or the Gospels, against his side; the right rises in a gesture that hovers between blessing and address, the open palm turned outward as though to display itself — an ambiguity the sculptor may well have intended, since the shown hand is also the stigmatized hand, and the wound, if it was ever indicated, would have been entrusted to paint now lost together with the rest of the original polychromy. The head is among the most individualized passages of the carving: tonsured, short-bearded, with broad cheekbones and small deep-set eyes, it aims at the recognizable “portrait” physiognomy that Tuscan art had fixed for the saint since the Duecento, yet translates it into the simplified, planar idiom characteristic of the master.

Everything else speaks the same language as the Saint Elizabeth of Hungary in the same collection, of which this figure is the natural companion: the massive squared volumes, the drapery disciplined into firm tubular folds with a few deep diagonal accents, the surface conceived as the taut skin of a plastic block rather than as a membrane responsive to the body beneath. It is the manner that the scholarship on Sienese Trecento sculpture has recognized as Agostino di Giovanni’s own — grave, structural, faithful to the tradition of Tino di Camaino’s circle — and the pairing of the two mendicant-affiliated saints suggests that both once belonged to a single ensemble, presumably of Franciscan destination.

At the rejected end of the spectrum stand a series of once-current attributions now generally dismissed. The prospetto of a Petroni family sepulchral chapel, dated 1336, in the cloister of San Francesco at Siena, was the one non-signed work that Carli in 1960 was willing to entertain as possibly autograph, dismissing almost all the rest as attributions “da respingere”; later scholarship has tended to see even the Petroni monument as more the work of Giovanni than of Agostino. A larger group of tomb attributions — the monument of Gregory X and the monument to Raniero (Ranieri) degli Ubertini in San Domenico at Arezzo, the tomb of Bishop Malaspina in San Francesco at Sarzana, the Bardi tombs in Santa Croce and the tomb of Corrado della Penna in Santa Maria Novella at Florence — descend chiefly from the survey history of Italian sculpture published in 1906 and from Anglophone connoisseurship of the 1920s, and are now decisively rejected for Agostino. So too is a 1982 proposal to assign to the workshop of Agostino and Agnolo the Gandoni and de’ Bonandrei tombs in Bologna, which Bartalini rejected. These rejections matter as much as the acceptances, because the inflated Agostino of the older literature — the master of monuments strewn from Arezzo to Sarzana to Florence — was built precisely by such accretions, and the modern deflation of his catalogue is the direct result of their removal.

Two further points of documented or plausible activity deserve notice, both illustrating the workshop’s reach into the towns of the Sienese contado and beyond. At the cathedral of Grosseto, which Siena brought firmly under its dominion in 1334, the sculptural decoration of the southern portal and window, together with related figures and heads, has been assigned to the workshop of Agostino and his son Giovanni, active there in the mid-1330s; the modern consensus, articulated by Kreytenberg, gives the determining role to the father rather than to the son, on the ground that the figures and heads closely resemble those Agostino carved for the Cino tomb at Pistoia, and notes that the archivolt and lunette group of that portal were in fact executed only in 1897, so that the medieval work must be carefully separated from nineteenth-century completion. And in the Sienese cathedral itself, a body of sculpture on the New Cathedral (the Duomo Nuovo) and the older Duomo has been redistributed by recent scholarship between father and son, with several pieces once given to Giovanni — three patron-saints of the city and two angels on the Vallepiatta portal, half-figures in the façade lunettes, prophets on the nave capitals — reassigned to Agostino on the ground that they do not consist with the securely Giovannesque group of the Christ in the Vallepiatta lunette. Here the direction of revision is the reverse of the usual: works long thought to be the son’s are returned to the father, precisely because the father was contractually promised further commissions when he consented, in 1340, to his son’s appointment as capomaestro.

Style and historiography

Stylistically, Agostino belongs to the generation that received and transmuted the two dominant impulses of early-Trecento Tuscan sculpture: the monumental, massively plastic manner of Tino di Camaino and, behind it, the dramatic naturalism of Giovanni Pisano. Carli’s Dizionario Biografico entry characterizes Agostino’s plastic language as deriving directly from Tino — massiveness of broadly squared, flattened volumes, rigid and weakly projected contours, movements that can appear cramped or awkward. In that same entry Carli delivered a famously severe verdict: through the few securely assignable works, he wrote, Agostino “appare di gran lunga inferiore alla grandissima fama di cui fu circondato fino alla metà del sec. XIX,” appearing by far inferior to the enormous fame that had surrounded him until the mid-nineteenth century — the Tarlati monument alone excepted for its “rustica franchezza,” its rustic frankness, and for the spontaneity with which it evokes the deeds of the warlike Ghibelline bishop. This severity registers a real critical tension. The documented Agostino is a competent, sometimes powerful, but essentially structural sculptor, whose figures function as plastic volumes disposed against a flat, abstract ground rather than as inhabitants of an illusory space.

The more generous modern reading, developed above all by Bartalini, sets Agostino’s manner against that of his son Giovanni and, in doing so, restores to the father a distinct and coherent artistic identity. On this account Agostino remained faithful throughout his career to a conception of sculpture as the alignment of plastic volumes upon a flat ground, while Giovanni developed a “pictorial” relief built on the atmospheric gradation of projection — a genuine spatial illusionism that constitutes one of the real innovations of mid-Trecento Sienese sculpture. The contrast is not merely a matter of quality but of two different conceptions of the relief surface itself, and it furnishes the connoisseur with a positive criterion — the clarity of planes and the solidity of bodies, functioning as compositional pivots within a larger ensemble — for isolating the father’s hand within the joint enterprises of the shop. It is this criterion, more than any document, that underwrites the modern redistribution of works between the two men, and it is worth noting how much interpretive weight it is asked to carry.

The historiography itself is part of the subject, and it is a textbook case of the transition, in Italian art history, from the Vasari-derived tradition to documentary positivism. The pivotal nineteenth-century enterprise was the annotated edition of Vasari and the parallel publication of the Sienese archival documents, undertaken on the twin convictions that Vasari, however entertaining and illuminating, was fundamentally unreliable as a historian, and that the study of Italian art could be re-founded on solid documentary ground. On that basis the twentieth century built and rebuilt the oeuvre. The first serious connoisseurship and the first division of hands were undertaken in the 1920s and 1930s, when a Master A and a Master B were distinguished on the Tarlati tomb. Carli, in the Dizionario Biografico entry of 1960 and in a long series of studies of Sienese and of wooden sculpture, established a sceptical baseline, contracting the corpus to a minimal secure nucleus and rejecting most of what earlier writers had heaped upon it. From the 1980s onward Bartalini and Kreytenberg reopened and enlarged the question — the former in a major article of 2002 devoted expressly to Agostino di Giovanni and in a book on Gothic sculpture in Tuscany, the latter in a series of studies that redistributed works among the members of the family and reconstructed dismembered monuments at Volterra and Cortona. The result is not a settled catalogue but a living and actively debated one, in which the same objects migrate between Agostino, Giovanni, and Domenico as scholars weigh the stylistic evidence differently.

The persistent difficulty is structural: the family workshop. Because Agostino, Giovanni, and Domenico worked together, frequently on the same sites, and because only a handful of objects bear signatures or secure documents, the attribution of unsigned works is an exercise in relative probability rather than proof. This is why the honest statement of the problem — that the hands cannot always be told apart — is not a confession of scholarly failure but an accurate description of the evidence. It is also why the confident single-author labels that adorn museum walls and guidebooks ought to be read, in this artist’s case, as shorthand for arguments rather than as settled facts.

Vasari’s “Life of Agostino and Agnolo”: a critical assessment

Vasari’s joint biography, first printed in 1550 and expanded in the 1568 Giuntina edition, is the source of Agostino’s early-modern fame and of most of the errors that documentary scholarship has had to correct. It is worth setting out those errors precisely, because each has had a long afterlife, and because the task of criticism here is not to mock Vasari but to specify exactly where his narrative fails and where, residually, it retains value.

Vasari’s first and most consequential error is genealogical. He makes Agostino and Agnolo brothers — “Agostino et Agnolo scultori sanesi,” born, he says, of a Sienese father and mother — and he traces their line to ancestors who, “l’anno 1190 sotto il reggimento de’ tre Consoli,” brought Fontebranda to perfection, and the following year built the customs-house (the Dogana) and other structures of the city. In fact the two men were not brothers. The one was Agostino di Giovanni, the other Agnolo di Ventura, and their differing patronymics betray that they were unrelated associates. Vasari, ignorant of the patronymics, converted a professional partnership into a fraternity, and in doing so fused two careers into one nearly indistinguishable pair — the very fusion that a century and a half of scholarship has laboured to undo.

His second error is the training. Vasari has both men formed “nella scuola di Giovanni e Nicola scultori pisani,” and specifically has Agostino enter Giovanni Pisano’s workshop in 1285 at the age of fifteen, so accomplished a pupil that he was called “the right eye of his master.” This is untenable both chronologically and stylistically. The first secure notice of Agostino is his marriage in 1310; an apprenticeship begun in 1285 would require an implausibly long and otherwise undocumented career, and would sit awkwardly with training under Nicola Pisano, who had died around 1284. The modern consensus, resting on the visual evidence, associates Agostino’s formation instead with the workshop of Camaino di Crescentino. Vasari’s picture of Agostino as a pupil of Giovanni Pisano who then perfected the master’s manner “in a Giottesque sense” is, as the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale observes, a construction designed to make the Sienese school a hinge and suture in a Florentine-centred, Giotto-centred narrative of artistic progress — an ideological armature rather than a report of fact.

The third error is the Giotto attribution of the Tarlati tomb. Vasari relates that Giotto, having seen at Orvieto the works of many sculptors and judged those of Agostino and Agnolo the best, was the reason the commission came to them — but that the tomb was made “in quel modo però che egli l’aveva disegnata, e secondo il modello che esso aveva al detto Piero Saccone mandato,” in the manner in which Giotto had designed it and according to the model he had sent to Pier Saccone. This is rejected by modern scholarship. The notion that Giotto furnished the design of the tomb and of its reliefs is to be dismissed, motivated as it is only by Vasari’s wish to annex the Sienese school to Giottesque culture; and yet, the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale concedes, the monumentality and the classical spirit of the tomb’s articulation are such that they would not have displeased Giotto himself. The one genuine connection, as noted above, is that the “Comune pelato” relief adapts a lost Giotto allegory — a specific iconographic debt, attested by three independent early sources, that Vasari or his informants magnified into a wholesale attribution of design. It is symptomatic of the reliability of his account that Vasari also miscounts the reliefs: he describes “dodici storie della vita e fatti di quel vescovo,” twelve scenes of the bishop’s life and deeds, where there are in fact sixteen — an error duly noted in the modern local literature on the monument.

The fourth class of error is the catalogue of architectural and engineering feats, and it is the most spectacular. Vasari credits Agostino with the design of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena “in Malborghetto” in 1308, makes both men “architetti del pubblico,” architects to the commune, and assigns to them the north-facing façade of the Duomo of Siena (1317), the new church of Santa Maria beside the old cathedral, the great council hall, and the completion of the tower of the Palazzo Pubblico in 1344. He further relates that, while the two masters were staying in Bologna, the Po burst its banks “con la morte di più che diecimila persone che vi perirono” — with the death of more than ten thousand people — and that they were summoned as ingenious and able men, found the means to return the terrible river to its bed with dykes and other most useful works, and were richly rewarded for it by the lords of Mantua and by the Este.

And he closes the Life with Agnolo at Assisi, building in the lower church of San Francesco a chapel and a marble tomb for a brother of Napoleone Orsini, a cardinal and Franciscan who had died there. None of these has survived documentary scrutiny as a work of these masters. The architectural attributions are, for the most part, unconfirmed: the Palazzo Pubblico was the product of decades of communal building under the Nine, directed by operai — works-officials and contractors — rather than by a single designing architect, and the notion of Agostino as its designer in 1308, though repeated by early-modern Sienese historians, finds no support in the archives, which record him at the palace only later, from 1331.

The one architectural attribution that some scholarship is prepared to leave standing as plausible is the Porta Romana at Siena — the great southern gate on the Via Cassia, built in 1327–1328 during the Nine’s expansion of the city walls, and traditionally given to Agostino and Agnolo — though even this is a conjectural ascription rather than a documented commission, and the surviving documents for the gate name the works without unambiguously naming a designer. The Po engineering and the Assisi Orsini tomb are unsupported by any document for these Sienese masters; the Assisi story, in particular, appears to be a confusion, since the Sienese marble-workers documented in connection with an Orsini cardinal’s tomb around 1340 belong to a different Roman context altogether.

Finally, Vasari’s account of Agostino’s death is a small but characteristic piece of romance. Agostino, he says, died “mentre andava facendo il disegno degl’ornamenti della detta fonte di piazza,” while making the design for the ornaments of the fountain in the piazza, and was honourably buried in the Duomo of Siena; of how or when Agnolo died, Vasari confesses he could find nothing. The documents give a soberer terminus: Agostino was dead by 27 June 1347. There is a poetic near-truth in Vasari’s linking of Agostino’s last labours to the fountain of the Campo, for the documents do place him and his son at work on the conduit bringing water to the Campo in the years 1339–1343; but the vignette of the master expiring over his drawing for the fountain’s ornaments is Vasari’s own embroidery, a novelistic touch of the kind that recurs throughout the Vite.

What, then, remains of Vasari as a source? Not his facts, which are largely wrong in genealogy, chronology, training, and attribution. What remains is his testimony to reputation. As the Enciclopedia dell’Arte Medievale concedes, what survives from the historiographic tale is “l’impressione del nome e del prestigio notevole di cui dovette godere l’artista, a Siena e fuori di Siena” — the impression of the name and of the considerable prestige the artist must have enjoyed, in Siena and beyond. Vasari’s Life is worthless as chronology and dangerous as attribution, but it is genuine evidence that, two centuries after Agostino’s death, he was still remembered as a major figure whose name could anchor a whole chapter of the Sienese Trecento. The proper task of modern scholarship has been to recover, from the archives and from the stones themselves, the smaller but real artist who stands behind that memory — and, in the process, to demonstrate how a reputation can outrun its documentary base by a factor of many monuments.

Conclusion

The Agostino di Giovanni who emerges from the documents is a Sienese master of the second and third quarters of the Trecento: a sculptor and building professional, head of a family workshop, active across Tuscany from Arezzo to Volterra to Pistoia to Grosseto and, above all, embedded in the civic building programme of his own city under the government of the Nine. He is the author, with Agnolo di Ventura, of a single signed and dated masterpiece — the Tarlati monument — whose audacious celebration of a warrior-bishop, and whose adaptation of a lost Giotto allegory to the cause of Ghibelline lordship, make it among the most historically eloquent monuments of the Italian Trecento.

That biography repays a moment’s reflection for what it discloses about the condition of the sculptor in mid-Trecento Tuscany. Agostino was not an artist in any sense the sixteenth century would have recognized, and the anachronism of Vasari’s portrait begins here rather than in the details. He was a magister lapidum, a master of stone, whose working life alternated without apparent discontinuity between the carving of effigies and narrative reliefs, the turning of vaults over the chamber where the Curia met, the raising of a fortress at a town Siena had just subdued, the contracting of a palace façade, and the conveyance of water to a fountain in the Campo.

The documents that record him call him magister lapidum in one breath and operaio — works-superintendent, paymaster, holder of a civic office — in the next, and they show him binding himself in partnership now with Agnolo di Ventura, now with his own sons, now with fellow Sienese masters. The Sansedoni contract of February 1340 is emblematic: a legal instrument for a street-side façade, drawn up between three masters and a patrician family, with a pen drawing sketched at its head. That drawing is not the trace of a designing genius but of a workshop settling terms. Nothing in the archive suggests that Agostino or his contemporaries thought the tomb at Arezzo belonged to a different order of activity from the conduit or the cassero; the hierarchy that would separate them was a later invention, and it is one of the several reasons why a documentary life of such a man will always disappoint a reader who comes to it expecting the shape of a Vasarian career.

The Tarlati monument, in turn, deserves its primacy not only because it is signed but because it is, among Italian Trecento tombs, unusually articulate about the world that produced it. Sixteen reliefs, carried on five corbels without other support, unfold the career of a bishop who is celebrated almost entirely for things a bishop is not supposed to do: taking castles, razing the walls of Laterina, mustering armies, crowning an emperor at Milan. The “Comune pelato” states the argument of the whole programme in a single image — the commune shaved and mocked by its own factions, an emblem of the misery from which only lordship can deliver a city — and it does so by adapting a Florentine invention of Giotto’s while inverting its politics, so that a warning against tyranny becomes a recommendation of it.

A monument capable of that manoeuvre is a historical source of the first order, and it is one of the ironies of the subject that the same object should be so eloquent about Ghibelline Arezzo and so reticent about the two men who signed it. Its later history has compounded that reticence. The decapitation of the bishop’s statuettes in the Guelf reaction of 1341 was a deliberate assault on the monument’s meaning; the transfer and restoration of 1783, with its re-cut heads and stucco reintegrations, was a well-meaning assault on its surfaces. What the connoisseur reads today, in other words, is a text twice edited by hands hostile or indifferent to the questions now being asked of it — a caution the older literature honoured less often than it should have.

From this follows the methodological moral that runs through the whole of Agostino’s modern historiography, and it is worth stating in general terms because it is not peculiar to him. Where a family workshop operates on shared sites in a shared idiom, and where only a handful of objects carry a signature or a contract, attribution ceases to be a matter of demonstration and becomes a comparison of probabilities. Every positive criterion available in this case is itself an inference: the planar, structurally conceived relief assigned to the father against the atmospheric, “pictorial” relief assigned to the son is a genuinely useful distinction, and it has done real work in sorting the Sienese and Grosseto sculpture between the two men, but it is a hypothesis about two temperaments erected upon a very small documented base and then asked to carry a large unsigned corpus.

Even the apparently hardest kind of evidence proves soft under pressure: the inscription revealed by cleaning on the base of the Pisan Annunciata names Agostino and Stefano Accolti plainly enough, and the dispute over it turns not on the reading but on the question of what an incised name on a medieval object is for — maker or donor, artisan or patron — which no amount of looking at the statue can settle. The honest conclusion is not scepticism about all attribution but precision about its status: propositions of different strength should be reported at different strengths, and the difference between “signed,” “documented,” “attributed,” and “formerly attributed” is the most important information a catalogue entry can convey.

It is also worth registering how closely the geography of Agostino’s documented career tracks the political geography of his city. The commissions do not scatter at random across Tuscany; they follow, with striking fidelity, the arc of Sienese ambition under the government of the Nine. The errand to Pier Saccone at Arezzo in 1329 and the tomb that followed export Sienese craftsmanship to a Ghibelline lordship at the height of its local ascendancy. The vaults of the Palazzo comunale, the office of Operaio della Torre, the conduit to the Campo, and the Sansedoni façade belong to the monumental self-fashioning of the commune itself.

The cassero at Massa Marittima in 1336 is fortification raised over a town that had submitted the previous year, and the workshop’s activity at Grosseto in the mid-1330s follows that city’s subjection in 1334 by no more than a season or two. To build for Siena in these decades was to participate in a programme in which sculpture, walls, gates, fountains, and fortresses were continuous instruments of the same civic will. This is the sense in which Agostino is a genuinely representative figure: not the solitary innovator of the Vasarian narrative, but the kind of skilled professional through whom a mercantile oligarchy at the height of its confidence built, decorated, and garrisoned its dominion — until the plague of 1348, which almost certainly carried off his elder son and closed the family’s first generation, and the fall of the Nine in 1355 brought that whole culture of building to an end.

Finally, it should be said plainly how much of this artist is simply gone, because the losses shape everything that can now be claimed. The polychrome Annunciata at Pisa stands, if the inscription names its carver, for an entire practice of painted wooden sculpture of which almost nothing survives, and the Gabriel who once completed that group is lost with it. Not a single building can be securely assigned to him, though he spent years in the service of the greatest building programme of Trecento Siena; the Porta Romana remains a plausible conjecture rather than a documented commission, and the Palazzo Pubblico was the work of decades of committees, operai, and contractors in which no designer’s name was thought worth preserving.

The Cino monument has lost two flanking statues to a museum and the poet’s right hand to a restorer’s stucco. Against these losses, and against the collaborative reality of the shop, the confidence of the older attributions looks less like knowledge than like a preference for tidiness — and the modern deflation of the corpus, salutary as it was, has itself proved not to be the last word, since Bartalini and Kreytenberg have returned to the father works that Carli’s scepticism had removed from him or that had been given to his sons. A catalogue that oscillates in this way is not a scandal. It is what an evidentiary situation of this kind honestly looks like.

Around that fixed point revolves a contested corpus, best described not as a stable catalogue but as an ongoing scholarly argument conducted in the register of probability, in which the same objects pass between father and sons as the evidence is weighed and re-weighed. To write about Agostino responsibly is to hold the documented, the attributed, and the legendary firmly apart — and, in doing so, to watch the inflated hero of Vasari’s imagination give way to the more modest, but ultimately far more interesting, figure that the evidence actually supports: not the pupil of Giotto and Giovanni Pisano who tamed the Po and designed the Palazzo Pubblico, but a capable and occasionally powerful Sienese magister whose one certain masterpiece still repays the closest looking.