Vecchietta at Santa Maria della Scala. A new vision for the museum complex

In 2025, just over six hundred years after the birth of Lorenzo di Pietro, known as Vecchietta (Siena, 1410–1480), the Santa Maria della Scala museum complex has decided to rearrange some of its rooms, starting from the figure of the artist who worked here most profoundly. Vecchietta worked for the Hospital for over fifty years. His works—from the fresco in the Pellegrinaio, to the frescoes in the Old Sacristy, to the bronze ciborium, now in the Cathedral—not only decorate, but construct a vision and give shape to an identity. It is from this awareness of a unique and foundational relationship that the new layout of the monumental rooms of the Hospital proceeds. The Old Sacristy (with the Arliquiera repositioned) regains its function as an architectural reliquary and its frescoes are once again legible; the bronze Christ of the Santissima Annunziata, one of the pinnacles of 15th-century Italian sculpture, can for the first time be observed up close. The Pellegrinaio returns to the center of the visit, cleared of installations that today seemed too intrusive.

Promoted by the Municipality of Siena, the project originates from an idea by Cristiano Leone, President of the Foundation, with curatorship by Giulio Dalvit Associate Curator at the Frick Collection in New York, and also includes the publication of the first critical monograph dedicated to the artist since 1937, titled Vecchietta, also edited by Giulio Dalvit, available in both English and Italian, which retraces his entire oeuvre, presenting his profile in an updated, international historiographical perspective. The volume is published by Paul Holberton Publishingof London and was produced in collaboration with the Frick Collection in New York, and for the Italian edition features the contribution of the Fondazione Antico Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala.

The Pellegrinaio
In 1328 the Hospital was expanded by building a men’s pilgrims' hall, which only later, after other works, was called the “middle pilgrims' hall” (pellegrinaio di mezzo). Under the rectorship of Giovanni di Francesco Buzzichelli (1434–44), this space was transformed into a ceremonial hall: no longer a dormitory, but a place where the institution staged, through a monumental fresco cycle, its own identity and mission. The vaults, with fifty-six saints painted by Agostino di Marsilio, crown the walls, which are clearly divided: on the right, Domenico di Bartolo illustrates the everyday works of hospital charity; on the left, Vecchietta, Priamo della Quercia, and Domenico himself recount the history of the institution. The last bay was added only in 1577, while the large table by Flaminio Del Turco, made at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was placed in the hall in 1783. The first scene of the left wall is by Vecchietta: the Vision of the Blessed Sorore (1441), his first signed work. Sorore—legendary oblate and founder of the Hospital—is kneeling before a canon of the Cathedral. He points to his eyes or forehead, confirming what he sees clearly and what remains invisible to the onlookers: three naked children, the souls of the gittatelli taken in by the Hospital, who ascend a ladder of rungs to the Virgin, ready to receive them by the wrists. Invisible to all but two young men at the edges: they are Vecchietta and his brother Nanni, also working in the pilgrims' hall (though in a secondary role). Their presence is not an affectation, but an assertion of their role. As stated in the breve of the Painters’ Guild, the artist is a “revealer of miraculous things”: Vecchietta, unlike others, must see. He is the conduit between the vision and its representation, the one who makes the invisible visible. In his first known work, Vecchietta tackles an unprecedented iconography, comprehensible only in light of the history of the Hospital. The building in fact stands “ante gradus maioris ecclesie,” before the long staircase of the Cathedral: actual steps confirming its subordinate position to the cathedral. But already in hospital emblems, that staircase had been reduced to a ladder: in Vecchietta’s fresco, this ladder finally finds its mythical origin—not steps (gradus) leading to the Cathedral, but a vertical, miraculous ladder, which miraculously appeared to the founder of the Hospital. Vecchietta did not continue his work beyond this bay. From 1442, the wall was continued by Domenico di Bartolo and then by Priamo della Quercia. Perhaps the artist had left Siena for Castiglione Olona, near Varese, though some critics date that Lombard sojourn to earlier years. In any case, the Hospital never ended its relationship with him, later assigning him the Old Sacristy and the monumental bronze ciborium of the church.The Old Sacristy
In 1359, the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala came into possession of a treasure from afar: a group of relics from the imperial palace of Constantinople—a piece of the Virgin’s veil; a Greek Gospel Book bound in enamels and gold; even a nail from the cross of Christ, along with many others. The whole city welcomed them in procession. For Siena, perched along the Via Francigena, and for the Hospital, it was a masterstroke: the pilgrim now had one more reason to stop (and donate money). Less than a hundred years after the acquisition, it was decided to give this treasure a more worthy (and safer) container than the Chapel of the Mantle at the end of the church of the Santissima Annunziata, where the relics were previously kept. Between 1445 and 1449, thanks to Vecchietta’s work, the entire room was transformed into a gigantic architectural reliquary. The sacristy became a

camera-codex: the Apostles’ Creed (“I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth…”) unrolls along the lunettes of the whole hall as a painted text, each article flanked by its apostle and, in the lower register, its prefiguration from the Old Testament. This is the Concordia Testamentorum: a cycle of complexity and erudition without precedent. At the center of the vault a blessing Christ, around him the doctors and prophets, and everywhere scrolls, books, inscriptions: the chain of transmission of the word of God—emphasized here against the doubts newly raised, in 1444, by Lorenzo Valla on the apostolic origin of the Creed. Set into the frescoes at the base of the arch, which still shows its shape, was the Arliquiera, a painted wooden cabinet for safeguarding the relics: when closed, it displays a civic pantheon of Sienese saints and blesseds; when open, it reveals a Passion cycle, which integrates and completes the frescoes, inserting local saints and blesseds (and their martyrdom) into a thousand-year-old history of divine revelation. Vecchietta’s long signature closing the cycle guarantees, along with documents, his authorship. The project, however, was collective: two adolescents, Guasparre d’Agostino and Benvenuto di Giovanni, left their cryptic signatures in pseudo-Greek on the cloak of a white-clad figure in the Vision of Daniel in the seventh bay, beneath the Last Judgment. An almost clandestine graffito, but eloquent. Following the church’s enlargement in the 1470s (when Vecchietta’s ciborium was placed at the high altar), the sacristy (now “old”) became unusable as such and was transformed into a chapel of the church. In 1476 Francesco di Bartolomeo erected a marble canopy for an altar, which two centuries later (in 1610) would house the Madonna della Misericordia by Domenico di Bartolo, also moved from the Chapel of the Mantle, of which she was the namesake. The frescoes were whitewashed, and the room degraded over the centuries to wardrobe, library, classroom. Today, faced with the ruins of former glory, an effort of imagination is needed. But the Old Sacristy remains unique: a total reliquary, a relic itself. A place where Siena, through Vecchietta, staged the book as Creed, as image, and as a political act.The statue of the Savior (from the artist’s funerary chapel)

In December 1476, Vecchietta wrote to the rector and elders of the Hospital with an unprecedented request: he wanted a funerary chapel for himself in the Santissima Annunziata, to be dedicated to the Savior. The first artist in Western history to demand such a privilege, he committed to endowing it with two works: an altarpiece with the Madonna and Child with Saints (now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale) and a Savior in bronze, already begun. The proposal was accepted in February 1477; two years later, in his will, Vecchietta declared the chapel his universal heir. Where this chapel was located, and what form it took, is difficult to determine: probably “at the foot of the church,” toward the Chapel of the Mantle, as some ancient sources suggest. As the size of the church has not changed over the centuries, it probably consisted of a niche in the wall, sealed by the altarpiece and preceded by an altar on which stood the Savior: an ensemble that, crowning the career of an artist working across media, created a sculpto-pictorial Pietà strongly resembling a Mass of Saint Jerome (that is, the iconographic subject, common in the 15th and 16th centuries, in which the Doctor of the Church is depicted officiating at the altar as the Crucifix comes to life atop the altar). This Christ in bronze, still today at the center of the high altar, is a singular case. Never before had a monumental statue of the Savior in the round been placed on an altar; bronze had never been chosen for such an image. The Church itself had long been wary of precious statues on altars, fearing the allure of ancient idols. Here, supported by the painted panel, the Christ brought to the altar all the Eucharistic power of the sacrifice: the crown of thorns on his head, his body exhausted but able to crush the serpent of original sin. Vecchietta, in his seventies, undertook for his own tomb a technical and financial feat: a devotional act, but also a perpetual monument to his art as painter and sculptor. The chapel soon lost its function. Already by the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and certainly by 1575, the statue had been moved to the high altar, after the transfer of Vecchietta's ciborium to the Cathedral in 1506. Here Christ was flanked by the candelabrum angels of Accursio Baldi (1500) and, a century and a half later, by the dead Christ of the antependium by Giuseppe Mazzuoli (ca. 1670). In the eighteenth century, the fresco with the Pool of Bethesda by Sebastiano Conca (1726–27) was painted as a backdrop. Reconfigured as the Risen Christ atop the high altar, the Christ by Vecchietta remained unknown for too long, to the public as well as to scholars. But it remains, at the heart of the Santissima Annunziata, one of the peaks of Italian Renaissance sculpture—now, finally, accessible.Cristo bronzeo, ancora oggi al centro dell’altare maggiore, è un caso isolato. Mai prima di allora una statua monumentale del Salvatore a tutto tondo era stata posta su un altare; mai il bronzo era stato scelto per un’immagine simile. La Chiesa stessa aveva diffidato a lungo di statue preziose sugli altari, temendo il richiamo degli idoli antichi. Qui, sostenuto dalla pala dipinta, il Cristo portava sull’altare tutta la potenza eucaristica del sacrificio: la corona di spine sul capo, il corpo stremato ma capace di schiacciare il serpente del peccato originale. Vecchietta, settantenne, affrontava per la propria tomba un’impresa tecnica e finanziaria immane: un atto devozionale, ma anche un monumento perpetuo alla sua arte di pittore e scultore. La cappella perse presto la sua funzione. Già nel secondo quarto del Cinquecento, e certamente entro il 1575, la statua era stata trasferita all’altare maggiore, dopo lo spostamento del ciborio del Vecchietta in Duomo nel 1506. Qui il Cristo fu affiancato dagli angeli-candelabro di Accursio Baldi (1500) e, un secolo e mezzo più tardi, dal Cristo morto dell’antependio di Giuseppe Mazzuoli (ca. 1670). Nel Settecento, venne dipinto l’affresco con la Piscina probatica di Sebastiano Conca (1726–27) a fargli da sfondo. Riconfigurato come Risorto al culmine dell’altare maggiore, il Cristo del Vecchietta è rimasto troppo a lungo sconosciuto, tanto al pubblico quanto agli studiosi. Ma resta, nel cuore della Santissima Annunziata, uno dei vertici della scultura italiana del Rinascimento – ora, finalmente, accessibile.