Pietro Lorenzetti

Painter from Siena, C Italy. Probably a pupil of Duccio, he was one of the liveliest of the early Sienese painters. He also worked at Arezzo (the polyptych in S Maria della Pieve) and Assisi, where he painted dramatic frescoes of ‘The Passion’ in the Lower Church of S Francis. His ‘Madonna’ (1340) is in the Uffizi Gallery.

He was influenced by Giovanni Pisano, Giotto worked alongside Simone Martini at Assisi. In their artistry work and experiments with three-dimensional and spatial arrangements, they foreshadowed the art of the Renaissance. Many of his religious works are in churches in Siena, Arezzo, and Assisi. One of his last works (1342) is the "Birth of the Virgin" now in the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo. His masterwork is a tempera fresco decorations of the lower church of Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi. The massed figures in these scenes shows geometric emotional interactions, unlike many prior scenographic depictions which appeared to be the independent iconic agglomerations, as if independent figures had bee glued on to 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 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.

Giorgio Vasari includes a biography of Lorenzetti in his Lives.