Vecchietta

This monumental book is the first monograph devoted to the Sienese artist Lorenzo di Pietro, known as Vecchietta (1410–1480)

Included is a wealth of new scholarship and archival material, as well as stunning new photography. A painter, sculptor, architect, and goldsmith, Vecchietta is a towering figure in the history of Quattrocento Siena and, as the book brilliantly demonstrates, a central protagonist of Italian art of the so-called Early Renaissance. Vecchietta's long life and diverse oeuvre across multiple media provide a prism through which to re-evaluate the art of Quattrocento Siena, traditionally misinterpreted as ancillary to Florence. Vecchietta's immensely successful practice—in Siena, Lombardy and Rome—included painting, sculpture, architecture and goldsmithery, and among his patrons were such eminent figures as Cardinal Branda Castiglioni and Pope Pius II.

Vecchietta was one of the few Italian artists of the period to paint an independent self-portrait and the first to design a funerary chapel for himself. He signed and dated most of his work, presenting himself as a sculptor on his paintings and a painter on his sculptures. He is credited with innovations in style and technique that paved the way for the accomplishments of the next generation of Sienese artists (most of whom trained in his workshop), among them, Francesco di Giorgio Martini. Nonetheless, there has been no publication devoted to Vecchietta since a 1937 booklet by Giorgio Vigni, whose preoccupation was to locate consistency in Vecchietta's stylistically inconsistent output. Dalvit contends that the criteria of traditional art history are insufficient to explain Vecchietta's complexity and that the best way to do justice to him as an artist is to subvert traditional expectations about the monograph itself. Among the questions Dalvit addresses are the following: How was art made in places other than Florence before art had a history before Vasari set new criteria to interpret it? How did a polymath artist work outside the Florentine tradition of disegno? A monographic focus on Vecchietta represents an opportunity to tackle these questions, and many more, whose answers have significance beyond the locality of fifteenth-century Siena.

Published by Paul Holberton Publishing

Exhibition Schedule:

Santa Maria della Scala, Siena

(25 October 2025–29 March 2026)