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This piece, one of many smallish panels from the backside of the 13th Century Maesta Altarpiece, by the Tuscan-born artist, has me obsessed.
In photographic composition classes (which is really just 2-D design with additional consideration such as depth of field and "texture" created by noise/grain), I tell my students that ideas about how to compose a picture go back to the Greeks, but have survived for thousands of years. Which is why we have to go beyond Modern photography's 100-and-something-year history (I propose that Modern photography begins with Eugene Atget) and look at the entire 25,000-30,000 years in which people have been creating art.
I love how every line in this piece creates a diagonal, golden waterfall of movement flowing down toward the beggar woman. Those dynamic vertical lines in the golden cliffs, and the garments of both figures, reinforce the gaze of Jesus, who has been stopped in his path by this woman, whom the halo indicates, is as blessed as any Byzantine angel, or indeed as near to God as Christ himself.
The episode is taken from Matthew 9:21. "If I could only touch the hem of his garment I would be healed," etc., said the woman who had been bleeding for 12 years, and therefore, "too unclean" to touch Christ himself according to traditions of the day.
Duccio's backgrounds were almost always empty and golden, but in this instance, he made a breakthrough: use the gold to create compositional lines and a sense of setting for a story. These lines reflect nothing less than what Duccio perceived as holy energy spilling down from heaven, through Christ, and onto the woman, an entire universe converted into a baptism.
And so we are reminded, even if we dismiss the religious references, that composition is not just a toy to be played with, but must be married to the subject of a work of art.
Of course, Duccio is important for creating "scenes" in which things were happening, as opposed to the usual arrays of flat-faced saints and angels. Sure, he had one foot in Byzantine traditions of flatness and gold. And earlier artist had tried to tell Biblical stories through painting. But unlike the more famous front-side of this altarpiece, which was more typical of the day, his smaller works originally on the back of it are almost single frame comics, each telling a brief story, for a public that in many cases, could not read.
And so, the idea of Narrative in painting is born with these three painters, but particularly Duccio. And along with narrative, it is inevitable that we enter into humanism, which would shape art for hundreds of years to come.