Siena and the Virgin

"Celebrating the Virgin Mary as both an object of religious devotion and a focus of civic pride, fourteenth-century Sienese artists established within their city a vibrant pictorial tradition that continued into the early decades of the next century. Such celebratory images of the Virgin were also common in Siena's extensive subject territories, the contado. This illustrated book explores late medieval Sienese Marian art - how it was commissioned, created and understood by the Sienese. Examining political, economic and cultural relations between Siena and the contado, Diana Norman offers a new understanding of Marian art and its political function as an expression of Sienese civic ideology."--BOOK JACKET.