The basilica of Santa Maria dei Servi in Siena has an unadorned brick exterior, in keeping with the demands of the new mendicant orders for greater sobriety of form. But it is also the result of the unfinished state of the façade, which shows the traces of the enlargement of the church during the sixteenth century, when the earlier rose window was bricked in. The area of the apse is a fine example of Gothic architecture, while the stained glass windows are the nineteenth-century work of
Ulisse de Matteis. Next to the façade stands the bell tower built in 1926 in the neo-Gothic style, repeating faithfully the forms of the bell tower of Siena cathedral.
The ground plan of the church is a Latin cross, following the dictates of Saint Ambrose, who said that the church should be shaped like the cross of Christ’s Passion. The interior is divided into a nave and two aisles, with the central nave higher than the two side aisles, separated by columns of various styles supporting round arches. According to tradition, some of the columns, attributed to the Sienese architect Baldassare Perussi, were made for an arcade, never built, in Piazza del Campo, which had been promoted by Pandolfo Petrucci, the ruler of Siena in the early sixteenth century. The columns, together with the engaged pilasters on the inner façade wall, number twelve, alluding to the number of the Apostles, the pillars of the Church.
The walls of the interior are covered with white plaster, while the undersides of the arches are decorated with gray painted rosettes set into squares. The architectural elegance that characterizes the basilica, inspired by Renaissance models in Florence, seems to echo a feminine grace like that of Mary.
The altars along the side walls were built after the sixteenth century, when the windows above them were inserted. Before then, the only altar in the church was the high altar, the only place where Mass was celebrated. But after the Counter-Reformation, with the changes it introduced into the organization of the Church, every important family could build its own altar, thus the number of altars multiplied.
These altars were spared the radical restoration carried out in the late nineteenth century for the purpose of reviving an imaginary Gothic style of the origins. It was then that the frescoes by an artist in the Lorenzetti school were discovered in the apse chapel dedicated to Saint John.