For Siena, art has always been the mirror of a society exceptionally well-developed in taste and customs, which considered art to be an indispensable part of its very existence. Starting in the twelfth century, beautiful buildings were built: a great number of towers, patrician palaces, churches in the pure Romanesque style. The next great project was the construction of the cathedral, which synthesizes the orientations of Sienese architecture in its passage from the Romanesque to the Gothic style. Siena is full of splendid examples of Gothic architecture, such as the upper part of the cathedral façade, apse and vaults of the nave. During the Gothic period, the front of the Baptistery and the great churches of the mendicant orders – San Francesco, San Domenico, and Santa Maria dei Servi – were built. Siena was acquiring its most characteristic aspect also in the field of civic architecture with Palazzo Pubblico, which then inspired other buildings in the city: Palazzo Sansedoni, Palazzo Chigi Saracini, Palazzo Capitano, and even others, such as Palazzo Marsili and Palazzo Buonsignori, constructed well into the fifteenth century. Thus some of the most typical motifs of local architecture, such as the Sienese arch, were worked out.
In the fifteenth century, Siena was open to the innovations of the Renaissance, manifested in the work of Bernardo Rossellino and Giuliano da Maiano and the Sienese artists Antonio Federighi, Francesco di Giorgio Martini, and Baldassare Peruzzi.
During the baroque age, Damiano Schifandini, Flaminio del Turco, Giovanni Fontana and Benedetto Giovannelli produced buildings marked by a harmonious, measured style. Siena is thus a mainly medieval city, but above all a city of art. This is Siena, and to get to know the city and admire it as it deserves, one must walk along its streets, where every corner preserves a fragment of history, and enter its museums and churches, resplendent with priceless masterpieces, almost as though great painters and sculptors had vied with each other to leave here a luminous example of their immortal art.
