Frick Collection Puts Spotlight on Siena’s Renaissance Role with Rare Bronze Sculpture Exhibition

The Frick Collection’s new exhibit, “Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500,” gazes toward the role that the beautiful Tuscan city, too often relegated to a Florentine day trip, played in Renaissance sculpture. In 2024, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” followed an earlier era of Sienese artistic achievement, but the Frick’s new show jumps mediums and generations, and is the first devoted to Siena bronzes. Spread over several rooms in the Frick Collection’s new first-floor Ronald S. Lauder Exhibition Galleries, the new show is by no means blockbuster-sized, but rather a well-curated jewel box.

Some simplified popular storytelling may posit that Siena never quite recovered from the Black Death’s 1346–1353 rampage across Europe—and that this played a role in eventually putting Florence on top in the Renaissance—but the truth is more nuanced than that. “I think for the second half of the 14th century, there’s clearly moments of crisis. But as always, moments of crisis can be moments of great rethinking, and actually cities and communities come out of crisis stronger than they were before. And I think that’s really what happens,” Giulio Dalvit, Frick Associate Curator, told Galerie. Every Italian city suffered in the Black Death. Siena continued to produce masterpieces a century later, as the Frick show demonstrates.

Bronze, the headline material here, lacks a number on the Periodic Table of the Elements because it is, in fact, an alloy of copper and tin, with zinc and/or lead potentially thrown into the mix. Surviving bronze sculptures are rare because the material was often melted down. In Renaissance Italy, bronze could be turned into cannon during wartime. Such has been the case since ancient times. Many famous Classical sculptures are known today through marble copies of bronze originals because the material was deemed more necessary than the art. The Frick show is here to cheer for Siena’s survivors. And it points out the rigors of the material by placing multiple works in open-backed display cases that show the labor behind the inspiration.

“We are excited to bring long-overdue attention to Sienese bronze sculpture, exploring both the medium’s and the city’s underappreciated importance in Renaissance art history,” commented Dalvit, continuing, “Uniting some forty masterworks for the first time in one location, this exhibition
highlights the revelatory achievements of Sienese artists, which constitute nothing short of a golden age of bronze sculpture.”

In fact, Donatello, a marquee Florentine name, sought work in Siena, but was met with a lack of demand due to the city’s resentment against Florence. His Siena Cathedral tomb sculpture of Giovanni di Bartolomeo Pecci, Bishop of Grosseto, from the cathedral of Siena comes with the revelation: it was in the Cathedral’s pavement, so people walked over it. That is why it is worn smooth in areas. It is one of but eight works that Donatello ever signed. And people walked over it. Donatello is a loaner coup, but there are also names that are less heard in the U.S. and ready for fresh discovery this side of the Atlantic, such as Francesco di Giorgio, Vecchietta, and Giovanni di Stefano.

Among the highlights are multiple Hercules and other male nudes that remind the viewer that Michelangelo neither personally rediscovered nor held a monopoly on contraposto. Francesco di Giorgio’s Judgment of Paris has a sfumato technique that carries the fragrance of Leonardo da Vinci. Indeed, several of Francesco di Giorgio’s works were once attributed to Leonardo even though da Vinci himself rarely worked in sculpture. Moreover, it is full of echoes of that adage about good artists copying and great artists stealing, and is full of compositions and poses echoed by later artists in well-known compositions.

International organizations have been generous in their lending, the Bargello, the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, the Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria in Perugia, Siena’s own Museo Civico, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert, and the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. That’s in addition to work from the Frick’s own holdings. Together, the sculptures make a compelling portrait of a city where artists brought remarkable expression and gravitas to an unforgiving medium.

“Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500” will be on view at the Frick Collection in New York City from October 15, 2026 to January 18, 2027.