Where the divine meets the mortal

What Edouard Manet was to Modern painting, Duccio di Buoninsegna was to the Italian Renaissance. A progenitor of what would become the artistic norm, he had one eye firmly fixed on tradition, the other acutely focused on his own uniquely sensuous experience of the world. That attitude produced a new way of thinking about art.

Through March 13, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has put on view its newly acquired panel painting by Duccio (active 1278-1318), “Madonna and Child.” New Yorkers will be enthralled.

Art tourists coming to town in February for Christo’s installation of saffron-colored fabric gateways throughout Central Park would do well to stop into Gallery 3, just past the top of the Met’s grand staircase, for a look. If they’re visiting from Los Angeles, they can lament: Here is yet another work of art the J. Paul Getty Museum should have bought but didn’t.

The painting, in tempera and gold on wood, shows the Madonna and child behind a parapet. It is small -- less than a foot high and just 8 inches wide -- and for a 700-year-old is apparently in excellent condition. (When the debut presentation ends, the panel will go to the conservation lab for a thorough physical exam.) Meant for private devotion rather than public address, it nonetheless commands attention in the museum’s grand room. Intimate size does not preclude monumental significance.

How? Duccio’s influence on 14th century Italian painting is hard to overestimate. “Madonna and Child,” painted around 1300 when he was about 45, begins to set aside the eternal timelessness characteristic of a medieval sensibility. In its place comes a sophisticated impression of life’s impermanence. Time enters the painting, bringing with it a modern intimation of mortality.

After all, Christianity finds life’s meaning in the mystery of death. How does an artist acknowledge that in a picture of Mary and her newborn, which has birth as its simple subject? Duccio pointed the way. He is the artist who most convincingly began to suggest the predicament of mortality. Life’s ephemeral nature forms the painting’s human content.

Before him, the prevailing Byzantine style used iconic motifs and abstract pictorial devices to convey a sense of the eternal authority of divinity. (Not coincidentally, those appeals to eternity also enforced the imperishable power of the church and its doctrinal supremacy.) Some of those artistic contrivances are evident in this transitional painting.

Imagine the small panel in a bedchamber, reflecting candlelight. The shimmering flat plane of gold creates a luminous space, impalpable and “heavenly.” There the infant is portrayed as a miniature adult, like his mother; his maturity conveys the wisdom of the ages. The Madonna’s starkly outlined silhouette and the elegant lines of drapery articulating her indigo garment flatten her body’s mass.

Duccio used these well-established Byzantine devices to articulate faith in Mary’s miraculous power. For people in Siena, the Virgin held a special place -- patron saint of the city -- thanks to their steadfast belief in her intervention in defeating the invading Florentine army 40 years earlier. After 1260, Sienese coins were stamped with the Latin legend Civitas Virginas (loosely translates to “The Virgin’s City”) and an annual three-day festival was held in her honor.

But Duccio also began to shift the terms of the religious message. In the painting, a baby boy reaches up to tug on Mommy’s clothing. Eye contact is made. Her splayed and unusually long fingers create a playful flurry of activity beneath the little guy’s feet. A narrative of glance and gesture intensifies their physical relationship. This is all new.

The artist is humanizing spiritual expression. On one level we have the Mother of God and humankind’s Savior; on another level a mother dandles her baby.

The parapet Duccio painted across the bottom edge of the panel is likewise emblematic of his artistic innovation. This barrier does two things at once: It separates the figures, elevating them from the mundane realm, and the illusionism of the corbels simultaneously pushes forward into our space. Mary and Jesus exist in the same corporeal dimension a viewer occupies, even as their golden atmosphere separates them from it.

Like Leonardo’s “Mona Lisa,” which cemented the Renaissance convention of bust-length, three-quarter portraiture for European painting, the Met Madonna is early in a distinguished line of standard compositions that would continue for a couple of centuries.

The picture’s apparent lack of precedent is distinctive for another artistic invention, which uses pictorial illusionism to profound effect. At the center of the composition, the blue and gold mantel around the Virgin’s head forms a perfect oval, which Duccio renders as an ample, three-dimensional volume. The surface of this egg is shattered by the infant’s upraised arm. It’s as if he has emerged from the shell. A stunning symbolic image of virgin birth, the event is recalled not as an abstract miracle but in humanistic form.

In this devastating little panel, the word is made flesh. The Middle Ages are drawing rapidly to a close, and the Italian Renaissance is dawning.

Paintings by Duccio don’t come around every day. They are extremely rare. Even the Louvre Museum doesn’t own one. Only a dozen or so are known, and most of those are fragments.

They were taken in the 18th century from Duccio’s monumental 16-foot-tall altarpiece in Siena Cathedral -- the celebrated Maesta. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts owns a magnificent Crucifixion triptych, but the intimate Duccio panels at Washington’s National Gallery, Fort Worth’s Kimball Museum and the Met’s neighboring Frick Collection all come from the multipaneled Maesta. No others are in the United States.

The Met’s new acquisition is probably the last Duccio that could come to an American collection. Long unknown and published in color only last year, the panel first surfaced in 19th century Rome in the collection of Count Grigorii Stroganoff, and not everyone agreed on its authenticity. It passed to Brussels’ Stoclet family, from whom the museum bought it for a price reported at around $45 million. (The Louvre was also reportedly after it.) One other Duccio panel is known to be in a private collection in Italy, but restrictive export laws make that one unlikely to leave the country.

Why didn’t the Getty buy it? A December report in London’s Art Newspaper, since widely reprinted, said the Getty was offered the Duccio but turned it down as “too expensive.” The Getty did not reply to a request for comment on the accuracy of the report, but the unattributed assertions seem unlikely. For comparison: The Met paid about $7 million less than the Getty paid for its great Renaissance portrait by Jacopo Pontormo in 1989, when adjusted for inflation.

Either way, it’s a shame. The Getty has bought some exceptional European paintings in the last two years, including “A Faun and His Family With a Slain Lion” by the German Renaissance master Lucas Cranach the Elder, and a Northern Renaissance “Adoration of the Magi” from around 1400, by an unidentified Franco-Flemish artist. But its European painting collection remains spotty.

That’s why the world’s wealthiest museum is destined to be as widely known for masterpieces it did not buy as for ones it did. Duccio’s “Madonna and Child” just joined the roster.