All of these paintings, in their monumental and melancholic look, the transparency of the veils, the shape of the thrones, evidently show how close the partnership with the florentine artist Cimabue has been. Cimabue was undoubtedly the most famous italian painter at the end of the 13th Century (Dante himself witnesses that) and his influence was huge: in Siena this is visible in most of the artists active during the last decades of the 10th Century. What distinguishes Duccio in the regards of such artists is, since the beginning, a thinner and more seductive pictorial technique, an increased softness and chromatic elegance and, at last, a new sensitivity, unknown to Cimabue himself, focused on some facets of gothic art ruling across northern Europe at the time (see, for instance, the gilded border, twisting in a thousand waves, in the cloak of the 'Madonna Rucellai').


The tendency to such calligraphic elegances coming from gothic style is pretty clear in a town like Siena, always open to every influence coming from beyond the Alps, especially thanks to the activity of some extraordinary jewellers, first of all Guccio di Mannaia, whose masterpiece is the sumptuous goblet Pope Niccolo' IV gave to the Basilica of S.Francesco d'Assisi. Truth is that the effective participation of Sienese jewellers to French gothic style is much clearer compared to Duccio's painting, where these elements will never prevail on the byzantine culture at the roots of his language.


Around 1288, a few years after "Madonna Rucellai", Duccio is quite busy doing the huge circular glass-window of the Sienese Duomo apse, a monumental work, normally placed at a considerable height, which will be now possible to view very closely during the exhibition, as it has been recently unmounted due to restoration purposes. In this work too the connection with Cimabue is visible, but some details show the contact with the newer leader of italian painting, Giotto, very young at the time but already busy to experiment those new space rendering techniques that would have later muted the course of italian art history.