Attributed to Ugolino di Nerio, The Crucifixion, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Art in Tuscany | The Sienese School of painting | Ugolino di Nerio
The Sienese School of painting originated in Italy in the 13th century and lasted until the 15th century. The style is distinct and clearly different from the more solemn Early Renaissance art produced in Florence. The unique style was influenced by French Gothic and inspired by oriental and Byzantine elements.
More conservative than the Florentine School, it drew upon the decoration and elegance of late Gothic art. Its principle artists include Duccio, Simone Martini, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and Domenico and Taddeo di Bartolo. Later significant additions to the Sienese School were Mannerist painters, Beccafumi and Sodoma.
In the Spring 1348 the Black Death was spreading quickly throughout the Italian countryside. In Siena the plague wiped out 80,000 people in just seven months. Many Sienese painters, including the brothers Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti perished.
The decline of Sienese painting from the second half of the 14th century is so splendidly described by Bernhard Berenson in his essay The Central Italian Painters (first published in 1897):

'With the death of the Lorenzetti, the Sienese school of painting fell into a decline from which it never seriously rallied. It had moments of hopefulness and hours of hectic beauty, but never again did it receive that replenishment of force without which art is doomed to dwindle away. Barna, Bartolo di Fredi, and Taddeo di Bartolo at times catch a glow from the splendour of Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti; and Domenico di Bartolo made an uncouth attempt to breathe new life into the school, to replenish it by introducing the shapes and attitudes which the great Florentines had just saved out of chaos and for ever fixed. But as he felt not at all the real significance of these new forms and new gestures (as serving to render either tactile values or movement), his fellows in craft and town had the taste to prefer, to the mock-heroics of a misunderstood naturalism, the unsubstantial but lovely shapes of their long-hallowed tradition. The ever winsome Sassetta lived and painted as if Florence were not forty but forty millions of miles away, as if Masaccio and Donatello, Uccello and Castagno had not yet deserted the limbo of unborn babes. And he has made us the richer by many works of rich, decorative beauty, and by that scene of visionary splendour, the Chantilly 'Marriage of the Seraphic St. Francis'.

But stealthily and mysteriously the new visual imagery, the new feeling for beauty, found its way into Siena, though it had to filter through those frowning walls. And the old feeling for line, for splendid surface, for effects rudimentarily decorative, mingled with the new ideals. Painters of this newness were Vecchietta, Francesco di Giorgio and Benvenuto di Giovanni, and, finer than these, Matteo di Giovanni and Neroccio di Landi, the two greatest masters of Renaissance Siena. Matteo had a feeling for movement which would have led to real art if he had had the necessary knowledge of form; lacking this, he became an inferior Crivelli, giving us effects of firm line cut in gilt cordovan or in old brass. As for Neroccio - why, he was Simone come to life again. Simone's singing line, Simone's endlessly refined feeling for beauty, Simone's charm and grace - you lose but little of them in Neroccio's panels, and you get what to most of us counts more, ideals and emotions more akin to our own, with quicker suggestions of freshness and joy.

Then it was already the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century, and even the Sienese could no longer be satisfied with the few painters who remained in their midst. Masters were summoned from without, Signorelli, Pintoricchio, and Perugino from Umbria, Fra Paolino from Florence, Sodoma from Lombardy; and as there were no forces at home to offer sufficient resistance, there resulted from all these mingled influences a most singular and charming eclecticism - saved from the pretentiousness and folly usually controlling such movements by the sense for grace and beauty even to the last seldom absent from the Sienese.'
[Bernhard Berenson, Central Italian Painters of the Renaissance (1897) | Art in Tuscany | Bernhard Berenson]

For a spiritual experience, the nearby Abbey of Sant’Antimo welcomes all who wish to marvel at its unadorned early Romanesque architecture, contemplate in its peaceful, prayerful silence, or be mesmerized by the monks daily vespers sung in Gregorian chant. Sant'Antimo is one of the most important examples of monastic architecture of the 13th century and by far the most important Romanesque building in southern Tuscany. The church we can admire today was built around year 1100 and took the place of an older 9th century abbey. Only a few parts of the first abbey are left. It belonged to the Benedectines, and to the Guglielmite friars thereafter.
Next to the church rises a square bell tower. The interior consists of three naves, with round arches resting on columns with alabaster capitals, all carved with geometrical, human, animal and flowers motifs. The women's gallery gives the hall a particular perspective; the semicircular apse, flanked by the apsidioles, is introduced by the altar, which the crypt lies beneath. A wooden crucifix from the second half of the 12th century stands behind the altar. Another wooden sculpture from around 1260 reperesenting the 'Madonna with Holy Child in Throne' rests against the right wall. The refined architectural elements recall a decorative richness with French influences.