Next to the Basilica of San Francesco, is the Diocesan Museum of Sacred Art.
Famous masterpieces and important art works trace the development of Sienese art from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century. Formerly housed in the Seminary museum and coming from churches in and around Siena, these are now on display in rooms adjacent to the Oratory of San Bernardino. In the upper oratory, dedicated to Our Lady of the Angels, we can see one of the purest examples of Italian High Renaissance art, in which two great artists, Beccafumi and
Sodoma, and a lesser painter, Pacchia, worked together, along with highly skilled wood carvers and papier maché craftsmen, to create a magnificent complex. The large rectangular room with a coffered ceiling decorated by gilt cherubs’ heads on a blue ground has walls covered with large frescoed scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, while above the marble altar is a panel painting by Beccafumi, showing The Virgin and Child with Saints (1537).
Once outside the oratory, the tour of the Diocesan Museum begins. One of the earliest works of Sienese painting is here, a Madonna and Child attributed to the Master of Tressa and originally in the church of Santa Maria a Tressa, the source of the artist’s conventional name.
The development of a Sienese school already receptive to the innovative style of Cimabue is documented by the oldest stained-glass window known in the ambit of Siena, a Virgin and Child from the Oratorio della Grotta near Siena.
An absolute masterpiece of European painting of the fourteenth century is the Virgin Nursing the Child, commonly known as the Madonna del Latte, by
Ambrogio Lorenzetti, which was earlier kept in the Augustinian convent at Lecceto. This panel painting is very famous and frequently published in art history textbooks. Ambrogio’s brother Pietro painted the fresco fragments coming from the San Francesco cloister.
Among the Sienese works we can also admire a Painted Cross by
Giovanni di Paolo and a polychrome wooden sculpture group of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms, made by
Vecchietta. A large triptych of the Annunciation, attributed to
Matteo di Giovanni, is a replica of the famous altarpiece by Simone Martini, painted for Siena Cathedral and now in the Uffizi in Florence.
On the upper floor are other very fine works; especially noteworthy are the head- and footboards of a coffin stand painted between 1525 and 1528 by
Sodoma for the brothers of the Compagnia della Santissima Trinità.