I had been looking forward to the National Gallery's exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350 for several ...

The thing about Siena is that it had everything a city needed ... clutching her veil – an image of which there are several versions here. What were the distinctive elements of Sienese art?

As the recent Siena exhibition in New York so beautifully demonstrated, these artists helped redefine Western painting for centuries to come. None of these Sienese artists survived the Black Death.

In the early 1300s, the Tuscan hilltop city of Siena lived through a great period of prosperity, said Charlotte Higgins in The Guardian. Its economic, military and political strength provided the ...