Duccio trained alongside his Florentine contemporary, Giotto, in the workshop of Cimabue, the most famous Italian painter of his time.

ECONOMIST: Italian painting: A touch of heaven | The

For Berenson, looking at a picture was always an emotional experience, a new discovery and only then to be placed in the continuum of Italian Renaissance painting from Duccio, Masaccio and Giotto through Botticelli, Titian, Leonardo and Michelangelo.

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Its first great painter, Duccio di Buoninsegna (c.1255-1319), would have witnessed the emergence of the Nine: a civic democracy in which Siena, a rich merchant city-state, was ruled by nine elected citizens (aristocrats and lawyers were barred from standing for election).

ECONOMIST: Italian painting: A touch of heaven | The

While Giotto developed a sense of volume in his painting, Duccio stuck to the two-dimensional painting of Cimabue and surpassed it, leavening the Byzantine forms with brilliant hues and a tenderness between Madonna and Child (pictured) that could touch his viewers.

ECONOMIST: Italian painting: A touch of heaven | The