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 reorganize some of its rooms starting from the artist who worked here more deeply than any other. Vecchietta worked for over fifty years for the Hospital. His works—from the fresco in the Pellegrinaio, to the frescoes in the Old Sacristy, up to the bronze ciborium, now in the Cathedral—do not simply decorate: they construct a vision and shape an identity. It is from this awareness of a unique and foundational relationship that the new arrangement of the Hospital’s monumental halls takes its cue. The Old Sacristy (with the Arliquiera repositioned) regains its function as an architectural reliquary and its frescoes are once again visible; the bronze Christ of the Santissima Annunziata, one of the masterpieces of Italian sculpture of the fifteenth century, can for the first time be seen up close. The Pellegrinaio returns to the center of the visit, cleared of installations that now seemed too intrusive.

Promoted by Comune di 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, entitled Vecchietta, also edited by Giulio Dalvit, available in both English and Italian, which retraces his entire oeuvre, restoring his profile in an updated and international historiographical perspective. The volume is published by Paul Holberton Publishing of London and is issued in collaboration with the Frick Collection in New York. For the Italian edition, it includes the contribution of the Fondazione Antico Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala.

The Pellegrinaio
In 1328, the Hospital was expanded with the construction of a men’s dormitory for pilgrims, which only later, after additional works, was called the “mid-pilgrims’ hall.” Under the rectorship of Giovanni di Francesco Buzzichelli (1434–44), this space was transformed into a representation hall: no longer a dormitory, but a place where the institution staged its own identity and mission through a monumental fresco cycle. The vaults, with fifty-six saints painted by Agostino di Marsilio, rise above walls clearly divided: on the right, Domenico di Bartolo illustrates the daily 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, executed at the beginning of the seventeenth century, was placed in the hall in 1783. The first scene on 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 clearly sees, but which remains invisible to the onlookers: three naked children, the souls of the gittatelli taken in by the Hospital, climbing a ladder up to the Virgin, ready to welcome them by the wrists. Invisible to all, except for two young men at the margins: they are Vecchietta and his brother Nanni, who also worked in the Pellegrinaio (albeit in a secondary role). Their presence is no affectation but an affirmation of their role. As stated in the breve of the Painters’ Guild, the artist is a “manifester of miraculous events”: Vecchietta, unlike others, must see. He is the link between the vision and its representation, the one who makes the invisible visible. In this, his first known undertaking, Vecchietta tackles an unprecedented iconography, which can be understood only in the light of the Hospital’s history. The building, in fact, stands “ante gradus maioris ecclesie”, before the long staircase of the Cathedral: real steps that defined its subordinate position to the cathedral itself. But already in the hospital’s emblems, that staircase had been reduced to a ladder: in Vecchietta’s fresco, this ladder finally finds its mythical origin—not longer steps leading to the Cathedral, but a vertical, miraculous ladder appearing miraculously before the founder of the Hospital. Vecchietta did not continue his work past this bay. From 1442 the wall was continued by Domenico di Bartolo and later by Priamo della Quercia. The artist may have left Siena for Castiglione Olona, near Varese, although some scholars place that Lombard stay in earlier years. In any case, the Hospital never ended its relationship with him, later entrusting him with the Old Sacristy and the monumental bronze ciborium of the church.

The Old Sacristy
In 1359, the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala acquired a treasure that came from afar: a group of relics originating from the imperial palace in Constantinople: a piece of the Virgin’s veil; a Greek Gospel book with an enamel and gold cover; even a nail from Christ’s cross, among many others. The entire city welcomed them in a procession. For Siena, overlooking the Via Francigena, and for the Hospital, it was a masterstroke: pilgrims now had one more reason to stop (and donate money). Less than a hundred years after the purchase, it was decided to give this treasure a more dignified (and safer) container than the Cappella del Manto at the end of the church of the Santissima Annunziata, where the relics had previously been kept. Between 1445 and 1449, thanks to Vecchietta’s work, the entire room became 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…”) unfurls along the lunettes of the room as a painted text, each article accompanied by its Apostle and, in the lower register, by its Old Testament foreshadowing. This is the Concordia Testamentorum: a cycle of unprecedented complexity and erudition. In the center of the vault stands a blessing Christ, around him doctors and prophets, and everywhere scrolls, books, inscriptions: the transmission chain of God’s word—reaffirmed here against the doubts about the apostolic origin of the Creed raised by Lorenzo Valla in 1444. Set between the frescoes at the bottom of the arch (which still bears its shape) was the Arliquiera, a painted wooden cabinet to safeguard the relics: closed, it displays a civic pantheon of Sienese saints and blesseds; open, it reveals a Passion cycle that both completes and integrates the frescoes, inserting local saints and blesseds (and their martyrdom) into the millenary history of divine revelation. Vecchietta’s long signature at the end of the cycle guarantees, along with documents, its autograph status. However, the worksite was collective: two adolescents, Guasparre d’Agostino and Benvenuto di Giovanni, left their ciphered signatures in pseudo-Greek characters on the robe of a white-clad figure in the Vision of Daniel in the seventh bay, below the Last Judgment. An almost clandestine graffito, but eloquent. Following the expansion of the church in the 1470s (when Vecchietta’s ciborium was placed on the main altar), the sacristy (now “old”) ceased to serve as such and was transformed into a chapel of the church. In 1476, Francesco di Bartolomeo erected a marble canopy over an altar, which two centuries later (1610) was to house the Madonna della Misericordia by Domenico di Bartolo, also transferred from the Cappella del Manto, of which it was the namesake. The frescoes were whitewashed, and the room was gradually degraded over the centuries into a wardrobe, library, and classroom. Today, standing before the ruins of its former glory, an effort of imagination is needed. But the Old Sacristy remains unique: a total reliquary, a relic in itself. A place where Siena, through Vecchietta, staged the book as Creed, as image, and as political act.

The Statue of the Savior (from the artist’s funerary chapel)
In December 1476, Vecchietta wrote to the rector and wise men 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 ask for such a privilege, he undertook to provide it with two works: an altarpiece of the Madonna and Child with Saints (now in the National Pinacoteca) and a Savior in bronze already underway. 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: it was likely “at the foot of the church,” towards the Cappella del Manto, as some ancient sources suggest. As the church’s width has not changed over the centuries, it most likely consisted of a niche in the wall, walled up behind the altarpiece and preceded by an altar on which the Savior would stand: a whole that, crowning the career of an artist who worked across different media, created a sculpted and painted Pietà very similar to a Mass of Saint Jerome (that is, the iconographic subject, widespread between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, in which the Church Doctor is depicted celebrating at the altar while the Crucifix comes alive upon it). This bronze Christ, still today at the center of the main altar, is a unique case. Never before had a monumental statue of the Savior in the round been placed on an altar; never before had bronze been chosen for such an image. The Church itself had long distrusted precious statues on altars, fearing the allure of ancient idols. Here, supported by the painted altarpiece, Christ brought to the altar the full eucharistic power of the sacrifice: the crown of thorns on his head, the exhausted body, yet able to crush the serpent of original sin. At seventy, Vecchietta undertook for his own tomb an immense technical and financial challenge: an act of devotion, but also a perpetual monument to his art as a painter and sculptor. The chapel soon lost its function. Already in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, and certainly by 1575, the statue had been moved to the main altar, following 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 depicting the Pool of Bethesda by Sebastiano Conca (1726–27) was painted behind it. Re-imagined as the Risen Christ at the summit of the main altar, Vecchietta’s Christ has remained for far too long unknown, both to the public and to scholars. Yet it remains, in the heart of the Santissima Annunziata, one of the pinnacles of Italian Renaissance sculpture—now, finally, accessible*.

*Visits are temporarily suspended.
For information: segreteria@santamariadellascala.com