Maestà

Maestà [maeˈsta], the Italian word for "majesty", designates an iconic formula of the enthroned Madonna with the child Jesus, whether or not accompanied with angels and saints. The Maestà is an extension of the "Seat of Wisdom" theme of the seated "Mary Theotokos", "Mary Mother of God", which is a counterpart to the earlier icon of Christ in Majesty, the enthroned Christ that is familiar in Byzantine Mosaics. Maria Regina is an art historians' synonym for the iconic image of Mary enthroned, with or without the Child.

In the West, the image seems to have developed, based perhaps on Byzantine precedents such as the coin of Constantine's Empress Fausta, crowned and with their sons on her lap and on literary examples, such as Flavius Cresconius Corippus's celebration of Justin II's coronation in 565. Paintings depicting the Maestà came into the mainstream artistic repertory, especially in Rome, in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, with an increased emphasis on the veneration of Mary. The Maestà was often executed in fresco technique directly on plastered walls or as paintings on gessoed wooden altar panels.

Maestà (Duccio)

The Maestà, or Maestà of Duccio is an altarpiece composed of many individual paintings commissioned by the city of Siena in 1308 from the artist Duccio di Buoninsegna. The front panels make up a large enthroned Madonna and Child with saints and angels, and a predella of the Childhood of Christ with prophets. The reverse has the rest of a combined cycle of the Life of the Virgin and the Life of Christ in a total of forty-three small scenes; several panels are now dispersed or lost. The base of the panel has an inscription that reads (in translation): "Holy Mother of God, be thou the cause of peace for Siena and life to Duccio because he painted thee thus." Though it took a generation for its effect truly to be felt, Duccio's Maestà set Italian painting on a course leading away from the hieratic representations of Byzantine art towards more direct presentations of reality.

History

The painting was installed in the cathedral of Siena on 9 June 1311. One person who witnessed this event wrote:

Maestà (Simone Martini)

The Maestà is a fresco (970x763 cm) by Simone Martini. It takes up the whole north wall of the Sala del Mappamondo or Sala del Consiglio in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. It dates to 1315 and is considered as one of the artist's masterpieces and one of the most important examples of 14th-century Italian art.