The first part of Jackson Arn’s piece about the “rise of painting” in 14th-century Siena is interesting for its detail about materials and technique.

Chop down a poplar tree. Other kinds of wood could work, too, but poplar is an especially soft one, and your task is to trim it into thin planes. These you’ll need to coat in a barrier of plaster and animal glue—naked wood is highly absorbent, and you can’t have it drinking down everything you put on it. Wait until the barrier has dried. Sand. Repeat until you have a perfectly smooth surface. Sketch your preferred silhouettes with a stick of charcoal, slather the negative space in a gluey reddish mixture, cover that in translucent gold leaf (glueless, the metal has a queasy green tinge), and burnish that with a wolf’s tooth. Now, and only now, you may pick up your brush.

(I haven’t found what a “wolf’s tooth” is. Presumably a tool.)

At an earlier phase of life I couldn’t see through the treacly piety of early painting to the art beneath. Now I can look at the paintings per se, setting aside the religion. In “The Raising of Lazarus” (above), the ashen, revivified corpse peers wanly from its intensely rendered, rifled coffin, eclipsed by the gorgeous attire of Jesus and the crowd. The chromatic splendor of opulently studied garb captivates, along with the faces striving to enact emotions.

We can’t feel the full trecento shock of axial perspective anymore, but even the most familiar parts of these images still land with a slap.

I’m prepared to be shocked, if not slapped, as soon as I can understand and visualize what axial perspective is.

(Jackson Arn, “City of God, The Met’s Revelatory Show on Siena,” The New Yorker, 10-16-24)

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