The exhibition curated by Max Seidel "Jacopo della Quercia Donatello. The arts in early Renaissance Siena " will stay open from 26 March to 10 July 2010. It will take place at the main museum complex of Santa Maria della Scala, visitors will enjoy special itineraries and discover a Siena which, in the first decades of the fifteenth century, lived, in parallel with Florence, a unique artistic season that saw the passage from Gothic to Renaissance. There are 306 works on display, 22 restorations, 15 loans from collectors and the most prestigious museums of the world, new spaces open to the public for the first time.
There are sculptures and paintings, textiles and furniture, miniatures and manuscripts, many of whom return to Siena for the first time, there are also twenty polyptychs which have been dismembered in the course of history and distributed among various European museums, that have been reconstructed. In the crypt of the Cathedral, beyond the atrium decorated with exciting murals from the thirteenth century, we find the world of the fifteenth century Sienese goldsmiths: around the shewolf of Giovanni di Turino rotate chalices, crosses and reliquaries gleaming gold, silver and enamels.
At the hotel you can buy tickets of the exhibition, at a reduced price: they are valid 48 hours and they gives access to the Santa Maria della Scala, the Cathedral, the Crypt, the Baptistery and the Diocesan Museum dell'Opera del Duomo, allowing a thorough knowledge of the city, an understanding of the deep connection between art and the culture that produced them, and the show of "minor" works of art kept in these places.