Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti

Italian (Sienese)

BiographyPietro Lorenzetti, sometimes called Pietro Laurati, helped introduce naturalism into Sienese art. Experimented with three-dimensional and spatial arrangements. Religious works. Frescoes carried out in Assisi in the Lower Church. Religious works.

Little is known of Lorenzetti's life other than he was (putatively) born in Siena in the late 13th century (c.1280/90), died there (possibly) in 1348 a victim of the first Black Death pandemic then devastating Europe, and had a younger brother, Ambrogio, also an artist.

Pietro worked in Assisi, Florence, Pistoia, Cortona, and Siena, although the precise chronology is unknown. His masterwork is a fresco decoration of the lower church of Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi, where he painted a series of large scenes depicting the Crucifixion, Deposition from the Cross, and Entombment. The massed figures in these pieces display emotional interactions, unlike many prior depictions which appear to be iconic agglomerations, as if independent figures had been glued onto a surface, with no compelling relationship to one another. The narrative influence of Giotto's frescoes in the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels in Santa Croce (Florence) and the Arena Chapel (Padua) can be seen in these and other works of the lower church. The Lorenzetti brothers and their contemporary competitor from Florence, Giotto, but also his followers Bernardo Daddi and Maso di Banco, seeded the Italian pictorial revolution that extracted figures from the gilded ether of Byzantine iconography into pictorial worlds of towns, land, and air.

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