Art: An Escape to Renaissance Siena 15th century painting is a delight

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Sometimes very good wine gets kept until last. After a year in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art's public has submitted, once more, to being treated like two tons of anchovies in a cannery in return for a look at Degas, we have an exhibition of 15th century Sienese painting in the Met's Robert Lehman Wing, opening just in time for Christmas. "Painting in Renaissance Siena" is not only a delectable exhibition; there is also a chance that one might be able to see it, given the relative lack of interest in the 15th century. It is, in a way, a show for escapists -- for what could be more pleasant than to flee the brutish realities of modern life for the enameled, fictive grace and small harmonious scale of these predella fragments and miniatures by Sassetta, Giovanni di Paolo and Girolamo da Cremona?

But it is also, in excelsis, a show about connoisseurship, not block- busting. It was scrupulously and intelligently put together by Keith Christiansen, curator of the museum's department of European paintings. His aim, as far as possible, was to concentrate on narrative painting -- stories from the Bible, mainly -- instead of the static images of the Madonna in which Sienese painting abounds. Because these narratives are usually found in the small scenes around compound altarpieces, they have been scattered from Budapest to Melbourne in what museums euphemistically call the "dispersal" -- the dismemberment by thieves and dealers -- of big church paintings.

At the Met, a number of these narratives have been reassembled for the first time this century, and they are a delight to see. The show is meant as a 75th birthday tribute to the redoubtable Sir John Pope-Hennessy, formerly chairman of the department of European painting at the Met and one of the great scholars of the Italian Renaissance. No doubt the Pope, as Hennessy is known, will be happy: when he was 23, he wrote his own book on the Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo.

Not since 1904 has there been a proper survey of Sienese Renaissance painting outside Siena. Not even the enthusiasms of Bernard Berenson and his heir Pope-Hennessy could give a Sienese artist like Sassetta the popularity of a Florentine like Botticelli. Even today, Sano di Pietro and the Master of the Osservanza are not exactly names to conjure with. Florence, Siena's political and cultural rival, emerged from their wars victorious in more ways than one. Firenze has always dominated the Western imagination. You cannot imagine the city of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and Michelangelo any differently: Florence was the locus classicus of Renaissance thought and art.