Simone Martini

1284-1344 Italian

Pionnier du gothique international élégant

Simone Martini était un peintre italien né à Sienne. Il fut une figure majeure du développement de la peinture italienne primitive et influença considérablement l’essor du style gothique international. On pense que Martini fut l’élève de Duccio di Buoninsegna, le principal peintre siennois de son époque. Selon le biographe d’art de la fin de la Renaissance Giorgio Vasari, Simone était plutôt l’élève de Giotto di Bondone, avec qui il se rendit à Rome pour peindre dans l’ancienne basilique Saint-Pierre, où Giotto réalisa également une mosaïque. Le beau-frère de Martini était l’artiste Lippo Memmi. Très peu de documents sur la vie de Simone ont survécu, et de nombreuses attributions sont débattues par les historiens de l’art. Selon E. H. Gombrich, il était ami avec Pétrarque et avait peint un portrait de Laure. Simone was doubtlessly apprenticed from an early age, as would have been the normal practice. Among his first documented works is the Maestà of 1315 in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. A copy of the work, executed shortly thereafter by Lippo Memmi in San Gimignano, testifies to the enduring influence Simone’s prototypes would have on other artists throughout the 14th century. Perpetuating the Sienese tradition, Simone’s style contrasted with the sobriety and monumentality of Florentine art, and is noted for its soft, stylized, decorative features, sinuosity of line, and courtly elegance. Simone’s art owes much to French manuscript illumination and ivory carving: examples of such art were brought to Siena in the fourteenth century by means of the Via Francigena, a main pilgrimage and trade route from Northern Europe to Rome. Simone’s other major works include the Saint Louis of Toulouse Crowning His Brother Robert of Anjou (1317, now Museo di Capodimonte, Naples); this work was painted during a stay in Naples at the request of the king. During this stay, putative pupils were his son Francesco, Gennaro di Cola, and Stefanone. Among other of Simone’s works, he also painted the Saint Catherine of Alexandria Polyptych in Pisa (1319) and the Annunciation with St. Margaret and St. Ansanus at the Uffizi in Florence (1333), as well as frescoes in the San Martino Chapel in the lower church of the Basilica of San Francesco d’Assisi. Francis Petrarch became a friend of Simone’s while in Avignon, and two of Petrarch’s sonnets (Canzoniere 96 and 130) make reference to a portrait of Laura de Noves that Simone supposedly painted for the poet (according to Vasari). A Christ Discovered in the Temple (1342) is in the collections of Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery. Simone Martini died while in the service of the Papal court at Avignon in 1344.