The Church of Sant’Agostino

The former Convent of St. Marta in Siena

Not too far from the Sant’Agostino complex, on Via San Marco, is the former convent of Santa Marta, earlier the home of Augustinian nuns.
The convent was founded in 1329 by Milla de’ Conti d’Elci, a member of one of the richest and most powerful families in Siena, who after her husband’s death devoted her efforts to building a convent dedicated to Saint Martha.
The deed of foundation, a document still preserved in the Siena State Archives, specifies that the convent had to be built within the city walls in the new San Marco district, an area which already contained other convents, most of them connected with the Order of Saint Augustine. Moreover, even though the convent fell under the direct jurisdiction of the bishop, the nuns were expressly required to live a cloistered life and above all to observe the Augustinian Rule.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the convent of Santa Marta was one of the most important, taking in widows and young girls from good families.
Information becomes more fragmentary in the seventeenth century, and in 1810, as a result of Napoleon’s edicts, the convent was suppressed and its property taken over by the state.
The interior contains numerous art works referring to the nuns’ tie with the Augustinian order, such as the Scenes of Hermitic Life frescoed by painters active around the turn of the fifteenth century. Especially noteworthy are The Coronation of the Virgin by Vanni and The Burial of Saint Martha by an artist in the circle of Simone Martini.