For three decades, Hayden Maginnis has helped shape the way historians of medieval painting consider the art of Italy. Noted for his illuminating essays, Maginnis has recently set out to produce a three-volume study of thirteenth- and fourteenth- century Sienese painting that will surely set the standard for new approaches to art history for generations to come. The first book in this series, the highly acclaimed Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical Reevaluation, appeared four years ago. That volume has now been followed by its sibling, The World of the Early Sienese Painter, a text that will surely receive similar praise. It is broad in scope, clearly organized, and beautifully written. In short, it is a book that will educate readers of all levels.

Painting in the Age of Giotto focused mainly on historiographic issues, with Maginnis demonstrating how five centuries of often prejudiced art-historical writing clouded the judgments of specialists and lay viewers alike. Vasari’s pet projects and peeves created a bias embraced by generations of scholars, who in turn made objective treatments of non-Florentine painting nearly an endangered species. Maginnis’s dismantling of centuries of art criticism was offered in an attempt to revisit preconceived notions of Florentine progressivism, Sienese conservatism, and the canon of art history upon which so many of us were spoon-fed.

Eager to replace traditional views of Sienese painting with a more balanced approach—that is to say, one which looks at more than just the artistic output of the “Big Four” of Duccio, Simone Martini, Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti—Maginnis’s second volume moves away from his “deconstruction” of art criticism by considering the period and its players from a more objective perspective. Using as ammunition an array of archival sources, some previously unpublished, Maginnis shapes for his reader a complex social, cultural, economic, and political environment in which medieval Sienese painters probably lived. Rather than focus solely on “big” documents that relate the specifics of important contracts and wills, Maginnis uses “little” notices of minor tax payments, guild rolls, and legal passages to reconstruct the ways in which common (and not-so-common) Sienese painters managed their lives. Yes, he argues, these artists were justifiably famous for their craftsmanship, their ingenuity, and their talents. But no, he continues, they were not deemed as superstars or idols by the bankers, weavers, and merchants who lived alongside them in that important city. They were, instead, members of a society who played a role that was no more or less important than the ones played by any other tradesmen in that era. Maginnis takes painters off the pedestal built for them over the centuries and places them in a more appropriate social and cultural context.

Maginnis has always been able to express himself clearly and eloquently, and this ability shines through here. The organization and presentation of his material reveal both a certain logic in his approach and an uncanny ability to winnow out the chaff from a mountainous harvest, leaving for the reader only those morsels worth consuming. After a Prologue and Introduction, Maginnis presents his arguments in five chapters, each one broken into subsections devoted to particular details of broader themes. The book also contains a set of appendices, including a translation of the Statute of the Sienese Painters’ Guild (penned by Gabriele Erasmi), newly discovered documents from the Sienese archives, a list of “minor masters” working in the city, and a series of payments received by painters for the decoration of book covers for the Nine (Siena’s governing body).

Chapter 1 contains a brief overview of Sienese history and social issues, largely indebted to fundamental works by William Bowsky, Luciano Banchi, and Filippo Luigi Polidori, before moving on to a discussion of painters’ status within this context in Chapter 2. Here, Maginnis provides a mass of evidence to suggest that the Sienese art world was a diverse one, and that its heterogeneous cast of characters came from different social backgrounds, had distinct economic needs, and enjoyed varying degrees of success. Some were poor, others quite wealthy. Some (Bulgarini) were noble, most were not. Some (Pietro Lorenzetti) even had political pull, while others (Duccio) found themselves on the wrong side of the law. Yet most of them understood that they were kindred spirits who had to stick together. Artists as famous as Duccio, Simone Martini, and the Lorenzetti brothers on one hand, and as mundane as Guido Cinatti, Bindo Dietisalvi, and Pietro di Ser Dota on the other, are shown to have resided in specific neighborhoods of the city, sometimes side-by-side and often in clusters. Many struggled to receive enough work to support their families. Painters knew each other extremely well and on many levels. They must have known the specifics of nearly every large-scale project undertaken in the city through visits to their neighbors’ workshops and conversations with their comrades. Maginnis reminds us that medieval painters were people living in a community within a community, and in that way were not much different from us.

In Chapter 3, “The Painter’s Craft,” Maginnis discusses challenges and obstacles faced by artists as they approached their diverse projects. Here we learn about the formation of the workshop, different techniques and methods of training used by masters, and the function of drawings in medieval artistic production. He then outlines the commissions offered to artists during the period. By including the more mundane and frequently overlooked works that occupied the time of most Sienese painters, Maginnis reminds us that the business of painting only occasionally revolved around the enormous projects upon which modern viewers fixate during their travels and in their studies. Most of the objects produced by these artists, he insists, were small, decorative, and unremarkable. He then concludes by considering those few commissions offered by local institutions, the approaches taken by artists as they fulfilled the requirements of those commissions, and the relevance of terms like “progress” and “development” when referring to Sienese painting before the arrival of the Black Death. Through it all, Maginnis remains focused on broad patterns and “holistic” interpretations of artists in general while using specific examples to support his conclusions.

Maginnis’s crisply written text conveys a host of complex ideas both clearly and comprehensively, which in turn makes this book a very good read. But what is most compelling, I think, is his ability to walk the fine line between maintaining a dispassionate distance from his subject through a rigorous adherence to primary source material and a willingness to interpret those sources in new and innovative ways. Throughout this book, usually in paragraphs concluding subsections of chapters dedicated to themes supported by archival evidence, Maginnis speculates about issues that seem to be suggested by his documents. For example, after demonstrating the importance of the father-son relationship in maintaining workshop and stylistic traditions from one generation to the next, Maginnis steps back from his material to suggest that perhaps the stylistic break separating the generation of Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti brothers from their postplague successors might have happened because these leading painters had no male heirs to inherit their shops or to continue their painterly interests after their deaths (48). At another juncture, Maginnis notes the common view that inflated prices in Siena might not reflect accurately the economic status of artists working there before 1348, and that the seemingly high fees charged by painters for their services might therefore be somewhat deceptive. He then goes on to argue that many of these artists owned and rented out farms in the surrounding countryside, suggesting that painters in fact had enough disposable income to purchase fairly expensive real-estate properties as investment opportunities (71). While many are familiar with Giotto’s renting of looms to Florentine wool workers (and consider it an indication of his business acumen in a formative capitalistic society), few have suggested, as Maginnis does here, that this kind of fiscal savvy was actually quite common among many other painters of varying degrees of skill working throughout Tuscany.

For decades, Maginnis has demonstrated his ability to synthesize and assimilate arguments presented by others in the field. This ability shines through here when, for example, he applies to his argument the recent studies by John Shearman and Bruno Zanardi regarding the use of specialized drawings (patroni) in Italian painting. Noting the striking similarity of heads and figures in Trecento compositions, Maginnis argues that Sienese artists used disposable drawings on waxed paper that could be reversed to compose symmetrically comparable heads and figures according to compositional requirements (117-118). The idea makes perfect sense, given that Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, and their workshop disciples frescoed sections of the Lower Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, the very place where Zanardi, in his Il cantiere di Giotto: Le storie di San Francesco di Assisi, has claimed these patroni can best be seen.

The World of the Early Sienese Painter is brilliant, creative, and suggestive, all at precisely the right junctures and in precisely the right proportions. Readers of all levels of expertise will learn much from its methodological approach and the details that inform the core of Maginnis’s text. Remarkably, the third tome in this series promises to be the most important, as Maginnis will build upon the foundations put in place in the first two to shape new interpretations of monumental Sienese painting. If this forthcoming volume is as fresh, honest, and challenging as the first two, Maginnis will have succeeded in producing perhaps the most comprehensive and innovative study of Sienese painting in generations.