These great folk crowded round their Lady; after came a multitude of burghers bearing tapers; while the rear was brought up by women and children.

The bells rang and trumpets blew as this new image of the Sovereign Mistress of Siena was borne along the summer-smiling streets of her metropolis to take its throne in her high temple.

Duccio's altar-piece presented on one face to the spectator a Virgin seated with the infant Christ upon her lap, and receiving the homage of the patron saints of Siena.

On the other, he depicted the principal scenes of the Gospel story and the Passion of our Lord in twenty-eight compartments.
What gives peculiar value to this elaborate work of Sienese art is, that in it Duccio managed to combine the tradition of an early hieratic style of painting with all the charm of brilliant colouring and with dramatic force of presentation only rivalled at that time by Giotto.

Independently of Giotto, he performed at a stroke what Cimabue and his pupil had achieved for the Florentines, and bequeathed to the succeeding painters of Siena a tradition of art beyond which they rarely passed.
Far more than their neighbours at Florence, the Sienese remained fettered by the technical methods and the pietistic formulae of the earliest religious painting.