Is It Worth It? How Could You Ask?
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Duccio’s “Madonna and Child” has the scale of a manuscript – and it speaks volumes. Roughly 8 inches across and 10 1 /2 inches high, in tempera and gold on wood panel, it is a sublime exploration of intimacy and transcendence.
Duccio’s masterpiece (c. 1300) – call it an early Christmas gift from Philippe de Montebello to the city of New York – has recently entered the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting is on view in the early Italian Renaissance galleries until March 13, when it will be taken down temporarily for further study and restoration.
Much has already been said about the cost of the painting, known as the Stroganoff Madonna. At upward of $45 million, it is the most expensive single work ever purchased by the Metropolitan. People are asking, “Is it worth it?” But how do you put a price on an object that distills with the greatest subtlety, delicacy, and humility the experience, or essence, of faith?
And which is more mind-boggling – the cost of the painting or the fact that our obsession with its price tag should interfere with our experience of one of the greatest works of Italian art in the country? In an art market that sustains the sale of a Warhol for $28 million, John Currin for upward of $1.5 million, and Gerhard Richter and Jeff Koons for upward of $3 million, the Duccio is clearly a bargain.
Artists attempting to represent faith, or God, have always been at a disadvantage. How can an artist depict what he or she may have felt but has never seen? During the Byzantine era, the representation of faith was addressed through metaphor and through an adherence to a strict iconographic program of symbols and spatial structures – codified interpretations that were sanctified by the church. Yet, it was understood that artists, not rules, created art.
Duccio’s “Madonna and Child,” which may look odd to our eyes, was both a pinnacle of the Byzantine era and a seminal part of the transition to the Renaissance. For the artist was a towering bridge between the two worlds. He transcended Byzantine conventions and boundaries in part because he paid them the deepest respect humanly possible.
In Byzantine pictures, fixing the volumetric Virgin and Child in a flat field of gold leaf created the perfect metaphoric space for figures – simultaneously human and divine, held in tension between our world and eternity. The light-reflective gold field, representing the divine, is a solid plane, impenetrable from our vantage point. It keeps heaven separate yet parallel to our world. Yet because it shines back on us with actual light, it is spiritually and physically expansive. The gold (seen originally by natural and candlelight) infinitely flick ers and changes. The light envelops the figures and, like the Incarnation itself, penetrates our time and space.
At the beginning of the Italian Renaissance, with the introduction of humanism and the teachings of St. Francis, the rules began to change. There were two painters important above all others: Giotto (ca. 1277-1337), a Florentine, and Duccio (ca. 1278-1313), a Sienese.
Giotto put the Virgin and Christ on earth as human beings and gave them weight, gravity, and human emotion. Giotto invented what became known in Western painting as the “composition,” or “frame,” through which people pass as if on a transitory stage. He set things in space and time in motion.
Duccio was not as revolutionary as Giotto, but in a way he was more intimate and human. He instilled his figures with personal qualities – genuine timidity, fear, love, and longing. His figures glide through space and interact with one another with a naturalism that freed painting from outward orthodoxy into inward mysticism. He softened the stylized world of Byzantine painting and brought everyday things and textures into art.
In Duccio’s painting, we see Mary holding, or presenting, the Christ Child behind a parapet and surrounded by a gold ground. The beauty, fluidity, and grace of the curving arabesques and of the deep, moonlit blue-green mantle, as dreamy as sleep, is in constant tension with the gold. The Virgin swells and turns against the ground. Her slender fingers and features stand in for her sorrow, and her diaphanous hood falls like rain.
Her skin, a pearlescent greenish white, has a haunting, ethereal glow, and her eyes, trepidation. Her mantle opens and undulates across the plane, becomes ever more inward; her body, hollow as a tunnel in places – as if the Child had left her empty – gives us entrance to the painting. And the malleable gold ground – which asserts itself as behind, adjacent to, enveloping, and in front of the figures – becomes ever more frontal, advancing and receding all at once.
Everything about the painting poetically reinforces the story of the Incarnation and Resurrection. The Virgin supports Christ, who, volumetric yet weightless, touches off from her arm, rising as if He is ascending. The painting may have its moments of mother-and-child tenderness, but it is a tenderness felt in the handling of the colors and lines, the delicacy and intimacy of the scene, more than the interaction between the Virgin and Christ, which is symbolic rather than human.
Christ is represented as a man/child – as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He looks odd to our post-Renaissance eyes, but He feels natural to the picture. His man’s head represents the head of the Divine; His exposed feet, the lower regions of the body, His humanity. As Christ rotates upward, bending back into the gold, it seems as if He is leaving us as quickly as He came.
In our bigger-is-better climate, detractors will claim that – especially because of its cost-to-size ratio ($500,000 per square inch) – such a purchase cannot be justified.
But the Met’s Duccio is extremely rare. It is the last-known work by the artist still in private hands, and it has not been seen publicly in more than two generations. There are very few extant Duccios, and even fewer in America. Further, the Duccios in the collections of the Frick, the National Gallery, and the Kimbell Art Museum are all fragments (of which there are nearly 60) from the miraculous “Maesta,” a polyptych for the high altar of Siena cathedral (1308-11), which was dismembered in 1771.
The Duccio at the Met, which may have originally had wings, is basically a complete work. And the painting will certainly be the defining feather in the cap for the Met’s director, Phillippe de Montebello, who remarked that the “Madonna and Child … will become one of the signature works” at the museum, “filling a gap in our Renaissance collection that even the Metropolitan had scant hopes of ever closing.”
The Met has never had a great Italian Renaissance collection, and the “Madonna and Child” will step it up considerably. The Duccio – like Bruegel’s “The Harvesters,” El Greco’s “View of Toledo,” the “Merode” altarpiece, and the handful of Vermeers – will undoubtedly become known as a key work in the collection. I hate to think of paintings being used like baseball cards for a collection, or their purchase being justified because they fill holes on competitive museum directors’ timelines. All the same, I am thrilled the Duccio is at the Met. It deserves a price tag of $45 billion, not $45 million.
When Duccio’s “Maesta” was first delivered from the artist’s shop to the cathedral, it was accompanied by a triumphant, candle-lit procession of the entire city, replete with choir, trumpets, bagpipes, and drums. “Madonna and Child” did not receive that kind of fanfare here in New York, but it deserves one.
Until March 13 (1000 Fifth Avenue, at 82nd Street, 212-535-7710).