Talking Siena at The Brooklyn Rail

Mark Leckey’s conversation with Charlotte Kent organized by the Brooklyn Rail brought the Siena show at the Met back to my mind today.

Which led me back a few weeks to a conversation between Siena curator Stephan Wolohojian and BR contributing editor Alex Nagel. Wolohojian was also the curator of Manet/Degas.

Among other things they talk about seeing “the other side” of these rarely moved panel paintings, a subject that’s always welcome here.

what the brooklyn rail's alex nagel calls the other side, or verso, of the walker art gallery, liverpool's simone martini painting of teen jesus getting in trouble with mary and joseph for going to the temple, but that's not what is photographed here. this side has the engaged frame, built in, and has a reddish swirl with black and greys, a simulation of a fantastical grain of stone, but all in paint. there are also four labels slapped rather unceremoniously onto the painted surface, but those hadn't been seen for over 150 years, and no one at the museum even knew what this looked like from the back until it was loaned to the met, where this pic was taken in december 2024
my pic is a little clearer than the slide on zoom: “the other side” of Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple, once apparently titled, Joseph and The Virgin remonstrating with [the] Savior on his return from the temple.

Some were painted to resemble a fantastical stone, like Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple, from the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Another, a Martini borrowed somehow from the Gardner Museum, was finished in silver.

the back, or other side, as the brooklyn rail's alex nagel puts it, of the isabella stewart gardner museum's smaller simone martini painting is shown in this photo by the metropolitan museum to be finished in silver, incised all over with intricate patterns like the gold sections on the front and frame, except silver tarnishes to a darker mottled grey over 600 years so

Alex was a great editor and sounding board last year when I wrote a piece for the Rail on art & autocracy. Hard to imagine now how I ever thought that’d be a relevant subject.