active around 1306 -1345 · Siena, Assisi and Italian Trecento

Solid volumes, inhabited spaces and direct emotion make Pietro Lorenzetti one of the great renovators of Sienese Trecento painting.

Pietro Lorenzetti was probably born in Siena at the end of the 13th century and worked until the 1340s. Trained in Duccio's environment, like his brother Ambrogio, he belongs to the generation that transformed Italian painting after Giotto. His frescoes in the Lower Basilica of Assisi, notably the vast cycle of the Passion, combine the refined color of Siena with a new construction of the body and space. The figures have weight, the gestures respond to each other and the architecture becomes a place truly traveled. In The Adoration of the Magi, procession, mounts, rocks and city organize a gradual arrival towards the Child. The Crucifixion concentrates a host of attitudes around the verticality of Christ, uniting individual pain and collective drama. Virgin and Child in majesty with donors and angels retains sacred frontality but gives the throne an architectural presence and the characters a new closeness. Virgin and Child surrounded by eight angels transforms symmetry into attentive community. Pietro renounces neither the golden background nor Sienese elegance; he adds to them the gravity of the volume, the depth of an interior and the truth of a look. His altarpieces, frescoes and panels profoundly renewed the religious narrative. He probably disappeared during the plague of 1348, like Ambrogio, even if the documentation remains uncertain. His legacy thus links Duccio, Giotto and the developments of the Sienese Renaissance. The "Pietro Lorenzetti" selection notably compares The Adoration of the Magi and The Crucifixion. His reading favors space.

Pietro Lorenzetti gives a place to emotion: the body weighs, the architecture welcomes and the golden background stops moving the figures away to better make them present.