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Mary’s Freedom Daughter of Her Son
It is a giant-sized masterpiece: an altarpiece measuring 3.7 by 4.5 meters, painted on both sides. With its 53 scenes, it represents the most complete narrative of the life of Christ and of Mary. Duccio had the ability to “set up a mysterious resonance around every gesture, around a figure, an episode.”

by Giuseppe Frangi

“Sis Ducio vita, quia te pinxit ita.” There is no more simple, heartfelt signature in the entire history of art than the one Duccio placed on his famous Maestà. “Be life for Duccio,” he wrote in gilt Gothic lettering on the step at the bottom of Mary’s throne, “because he painted you like this.” The subject, of course, is Our Lady, the focal point of this immense narrative machine destined for the high altar of Siena Cathedral. Duccio was no humble, unknown craftsman. He was a famous artist, whose greatness made the whole city proud, a painter who received a fabulous sum for this work (3,000 gold florins, and all his materials were paid for by the Opera del Duomo, the Cathedral Works Commission). In truth, the size, too, of this masterpiece is record-breaking. It measures 3.7 by 4.5 meters (roughly 12 by 15 feet), and is painted on both sides. What is more, with its 53 scenes, it represents the most complete narrative of the life of Christ and of Mary.
When Duccio painted this masterpiece, he was probably around 60 years old. And yet, the Maestà expresses much more a sense of daring than of authoritative skill. Duccio shows himself to be a curious man, who does not let any detail escape his notice; a man attracted by clues, capable of tracking them down one by one, with the untapped energy of the latest neophyte. Let’s trace some of these clues ourselves, following in his footsteps.

The death of Mary
We’ll start at the end. Mary dies in Ephesus. Lying on her bed, wrapped in her usual glowing blue, she has the same face as when she became a mother. This scene of her Death (followed by her Funeral and Burial) is placed right above the huge scene of The Virgin Enthroned in Majesty, so the comparison is evident to the eyes of all. After the Angel with the shining palm frond announced to Mary her eminent departure from this world, she expressed the desire to gather the Twelve around her, who had in the meantime spread to all the corners of the earth. And here they are around her bed. But in the center, they have been joined by the Son, surrounded by the host of angels and patriarchs. In keeping with the iconographic tradition, He holds His mother’s soul, in the form of a little girl, in His arms. “Maiden yet a mother, Daughter of thy Son,” Dante sang. Jesus’ red cloak, woven with gold thread, carefully enwraps Mary’s soul, with a delicacy charged with affection that only Duccio knows how to express. There is a sense of complete understanding, of tender embrace in this little detail. As Fr Giussani writes, “‘Virgin mother, daughter of your Son’: this verse indicates the total meaning of creation as acceptable to man.”

Mary and John
Let’s take a small step backward. On one of the gables of the Maestà, Duccio recounts a rare scene: after Mary’s desire is expressed to the Angel, all the Apostles arrive in front of her house. Meeting again after so long, on the porch outside the door, they embrace, greet each other, tell each other the stories of their experiences in these years. There is a sense of brotherhood that Duccio expresses by compressing the space, crowding it with figures, as though each were seeking the others out. But the crux of the scene is inside, in the little room where, shortly before, Mary had received the visit of the Angel, seated on the same red and gold-embroidered pillow. Now Mary moves to stand up; starting to kneel in front of her is the one whom her Son had entrusted to her at the foot of the Cross, the beloved apostle, John. Rarely in painting has an attraction of mutual affection been expressed as in this scene, a sense of such simple but all-embracing devotion. Notice the dynamics of the hands: John’s stretch out toward Mary, desiring her embrace but held back by a stronger feeling of respect. Mary’s hands grasp and hold John’s, as though she had always been waiting for them. “Virgin mother,” Dante writes, and Giussani explicates: “Virginity is motherhood. The first characteristic in which the Being communicates itself is virginity. It is the concept of absolute purity, which has as its consequence an absolute vortex, namely motherhood. Virginity is maternal, it is mother of the creation.” There is no gesture more maternal than these two hands of the Virgin open and outstretched to welcome the one who has been entrusted to her as a son.

The Annunciation: the beginning of the story
Underneath the main scene of The Virgin Enthroned in Majesty, the small panels tell how the story began. The first act opens in a context not very different from this one: a house, with an airy porch that seems to have been conceived so as not to interpose obstacles or objections. This is the Annunciation, one of the most reproduced scenes in the history of painting (and one of the small panels that are no longer in Siena, after Duccio’s great altarpiece was removed from the altar and cut apart in 1771; like the Nativity, it is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC). Mary is standing, with an open book in her hand. Behind her, the door is symbolically half-open. At the arrival of the Angel, Mary has a slight start of surprise, reflected in the gesture of her hand brought to her breast as though in instinctive protection. This visit was not foreseen or expected. And Duccio underlines this fact with his usual subtle attention to details, like a scrupulous reporter: as opposed to all the other scenes, Mary does not have her blue cloak pulled up over her head, but wears only a pale pink veil to cover her hair. But then these details fade before the keen intensity of her gaze. While her body is in an almost frontal position with respect to the viewer, her gaze, with the pupils turned toward the corner of her eyes, is pointed elsewhere. By Grace she has seen revealed the “Eternal counsel” sung by Dante, the design of the Eternal. Now she has to say if she wants to be the “fixed term” (or, as Giussani puts it, “The instrument that God used in order to enter into man’s heart”). But things do not end here, because in the dialectic (which Duccio recounts with a delicacy for which we cannot fail to be grateful to him even now) between the restrained gesture of her hand and her eyes already turned toward her destiny is the documentation of Mary’s freedom. Fr Giussani writes, “That ‘fixed’ is not a block to Mary’s freedom, because the fixed term is a suggestion that comes from the Eternal.”

Mysterious resonance
“ Suggestion,” moreover, is the word that best lends itself as a critical category for understanding the beauty and lightness of Duccio and this, his masterpiece. A great critic, Enzo Carli, wrote about this in his perceptive essay on the Maestà. In opposition to the stalwart energy of Giotto, Carli spoke of Duccio’s ability “to set up a mysterious resonance around every gesture, around a figure, an episode, and to transfer its representation beyond the limits of faithfulness and illustrative expediency, and perhaps of an unaffected, heartfelt participation in the event.”
Duccio was this: the greatest prompter “in images” of the history of art.