The Italian painter Simone Martini (active 1315-1344) created a perfect synthesis of the ideals of the Gothic age: courtly elegance, chivalric pageantry, civic pride, poetic fantasy, and vivid description.

Giotto in Florence and Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti and Simone Martini in Siena were the principal figures in the transformation of Italian painting from a traditional Byzantine mode into a vehicle for the depiction of the varieties of visual and psychological experience. Their impact on Italian art is thus analogous with the roles of Dante and Petrarch in the history of Italian language and literature.

The earliest evidence of Simone's activity is the Maestà fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico (Town Hall) in Siena, signed and dated 1315 (restored and perhaps revised by Simone's himself in 1321). The relationship between Simone's fresco and Duccio di Buoninsegna's Maestà altarpiece of 1311 for the Cathedral of Siena, in the theme of the Madonna...