Extra dimensions

There's much to love about the Met's "Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350." One is the chance to move through a world where the two- and three-dimensional are not yet distinct - part, I suppose, of the argument that it was in places like Siena that the potential of flat surfaces to offer greater depth than sculpture or architecture was discovered. I felt this already early in the exhibition with the "Annunciation" by Duccio, above, one of eight panels from the predella to his enormous "Maestà" reunited here, where everything seems to be moving in and out of spaces as provisional as a folding screen. Not just the angel, who seems to be in three different spaces, and the holy spirit, dispatched through the open ceiling from above also through three spaces, but even Mary, whose robe seems to be reaching out of her space toward us. How fitting for depicting the moment when the incarnation is announced, and enacted.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti's "Madonna del Latte" is less complex, but this Mary seems as ready to bust out of the too narrow niche she's been placed in as the squirmy baby at her breast is to escape her grasp. Can a sculpture give you that sense of overflow, that sense you might be called on to catch this so human child?

And then there's the scene below, one of several narrating the life of St Nicholas, also by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, where not just space but time is torqued. It takes a little while to realize that many episodes of the story of St. Nicholas resuscitating a young boy are shown: the child wanders away unnoticed from a dinner happening at upper right, encountering a devil on the stairs at whose bottom the boy is then strangled by him; at bottom right we see the child twice, once dead on a bed, attended by a mourner, and once rising up, as two powerful beams come through a window, one to the dead and one to the revived boy - beams issuing from the mouth and hand of St. Nicholas, who is inside and outside the picture at left. Space-time is Möbius twisted like that staircase, fitting, again, for depicting the miracle of overcoming the finality of death. Can you do that in just 3-D?

Talking my way through this I realize that part of the charm of these works, ably conveyed by an exhibition design which moved around curves and corners and along unexpected diagonals, is that they are portals to a world beyond this one - beyond but bursting in.