| Abstrakt: |
Despite a healthy and engaged crowd, there was a definite hush among visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art's magical exhibition "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350" last month. They gathered mostly in silence, politely thronging delicate ivories and gold-ground paintings that seemed to glow from within in the darkened galleries. The work on view is extraordinarily rare, and the curators have accomplished astonishing feats of logistics and scholarship, in several cases reuniting fragments of legendary larger works that haven't been seen together in decades or centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER] |
