The Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta

Piccolomini Altar

Placed in the spot where the chapel belonging to the shoemakers’ guild once stood, dedicated to the Birth of the Virgin Mary, this grand altar was conceived to hold a small panel of The Virgin of Humility painted by Paolo di Giovanni Fei around the end of the fourteenth century and earlier positioned on an ancient altar in the cathedral. This majestic structure was intended by the Cardinal as a means of glorifying the Virgin Mary, protector of the Sienese and dedicatee of the cathedral, while the same time honoring the memory of his uncle Pius II, remembered in the epigraph that runs above the large central niche. A second inscription along the base of the altar indicates that the monument was destined to be the cardinal’s own tomb, but since he died in Rome after just a short time as pope, he was buried in Saint Peter’s, and from there later moved to the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, together with his uncle Pius II.
The execution of this marble complex was commissioned around 1480 to the Lombard sculptor Andrea Bregno, who worked on it together with some assistants, giving shape to a monumental structure. The front, whose form recalls a triumphal arch, presents a spacious central niche containing the altar proper, topped by a marble altarpiece that now holds a reproduction of The Virgin of Humility by Paolo di Giovanni Fei (the original has been kept since the 1970s in the Museo dell’Opera). This work reflects a fusion of two Marian iconographical models: the Nursing Madonna, showing Our Lady nursing the Child as an image of the Church which nourishes its faithful with divine grace, and the so-called Virgin of Humility, seated on the ground (from the Latin word humus, which means earth or soil), a representation that spread starting in the fourteenth century because it was particularly dear to the spirituality of the mendicant orders, who appreciated humility as the root of all virtue. The marble altarpiece, delivered by Bregno in 1503, is enriched by sculptures of saints chosen by Piccolomini to celebrate the memory of his uncle Pius II: Saints John the Baptist and Andrew in reference to the precious relics that Pius II had donated to Siena Cathedral, the newly erected Pienza Cathedral, and Saint Peter’s Basilica; Saint Pius, his name saint, and Saint Eustace, recalling the titular church he assigned to his nephew when naming him a cardinal.
On the front of the monument are three rows of niches, also holding statues of saints (except for the one at upper right, which was never finished). The sculptures to fill these niches, originally intended to be a good fifteen statues, was first commissioned to the Florentine artist Pietro Torrigiani, who began the one of Saint Francis; the commission then passed to Michelangelo, who carved between 1501 and 1504 the four statues of Saint Peter, Saint Paul, Saint Gregory and Saint Augustine, besides finishing Torrigiani’s Saint Francis. Usually not very well known because of a lack of enthusiasm on the part of the critics, the sculptures reveal instead a level of quality worthy of the great artist, evident above all in the two figures of Apostles, charged with expressive force.
The statue of the Virgin and Child, placed later at the top, is a fourteenth-century work by Giovanni di Cecco, originally on the altar of Saint James Intercisus.