Frick Collection Puts Spotlight on Siena’s Renaissance Role with Rare Bronze Sculpture Exhibition
“Siena: The Art of Bronze, 1450–1500,” features works that rarely leave Italy and is the first in a three-year partnership with Louis Vuitton
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 cle...