Siena: Rise of Painting 1300 to 1350 at the Metropolitan Museum was crowded when I visited last Saturday, with viewers standing in deep contemplation in front of gold leaves, pigments, wooden frames, and altarpieces. The exhibition brings together more than one hundred works from collections of The Met and the National Gallery, London, as well as loans from dozens of other mostly European collections. Stylistic unity underlined by a narrative structure was created by Duccio di Buoninsegna (unkown-1319) and continued by his Sienese successors Pietro (c. 1280 – 1348) and Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c.1290-1348), and Simone Martini (1284-1344), who then transported these visual breakthroughs to other European destinations – this is the overarching argument of the exhibition. The metaphysical center of the exhibition is Duccio’s Maesta, or rather 33 separate parts of it scattered in ten collections in five different countries. This altarpiece Duccio painted for the Cathedral of Siena was dictated by the city’s special devotion to the Virgin Mary after a miraculous victory over the much greater forces of its Florentine enemies at the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. By using specific details in these tempera on poplar panels, Duccio was able to build a bridge between more schematic representations of figures characteristic of the Byzantine visual tradition and make scenes of devotion that are alive and aflame. Six earthy stone water jars in The Wedding at Cana or miniature pink-white towns in The Temptation of Christ on the Mountain create inroads for us as we peer from the plateau of our digital age, trying to understand this remote life. Simone 

Martini’s gentle faces glow in the darkened space of the Met, arresting in their radiance. Dimmed light creates the illusion of movement and provides for the depth of the experience.

The second must-see exhibition is quite different in media but also in its focus. Simone Leigh at the Matthew Marks Gallery presents new works of a Chicago-based artist who, over the course of her twenty-year career, has worked in sculpture, installation, video, performance, and social activism. Based in Chicago, Simone Leigh (b.1967) is best known for sculptural forms associated with the traditions, structures, and textures rooted in the African diaspora. In the artist’s own words, her work and multi-dimensional approach “Sometimes, it collapses time. Sometimes, it makes similarities that may have happened over a millennium more obvious.” Spacious white cubes of Matthew Mark Gallery greet us with eleven massive sculptures; they vary in degrees of abstraction and remoteness. Artemis (2022–24) is a milk-white life-size sculpture of a headless woman all covered in a dress of delicate, breast-like forms. The intricate lace drapery is made from porcelain, bringing to mind all the tea sets made from this material and the not-so-delicate 

cultural associations within the history of the slave trade. Yet, Leigh does not specifically point us in this direction, giving us ample opportunity to delightfully commune with her vision of strong and faceless female bodies. “Abstracting the figure,” Leigh explains, “I imagine a kind of experience, a state of being, rather than one person.”  Another delicate sculpture is a bust of a woman, also headless and completely covered in hundreds of hand-rolled porcelain rosettes. It is blue, perhaps an overt homage to Tony Morrison’s novel, or perhaps it is just my brain trying to frame the context in a specific way.

Although Duccio and Simone Leigh stand at very different vantage points, essentially, both of these exhibitions work with aspects of narrative time. If Duccio was among the first to solidify it in the context of Italian painterly tradition, Simone Leigh plays with it at will, picking and choosing from her cultural African heritage and showing us this abstracted knowledge. Although in his seminal 1925 essay, Dehumanization of Art, Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset asserted that as soon as art becomes dominated by aesthetic concerns, it creates a detachment from a human story, these shows on view illustrate quite the opposite. Human stories behind them come back to us.