In Conversation With…Stephan Wolohjian and Laura Llewellyn, Curators of Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350

Stephan Wolohjian and Laura Llewellyn are two of a group of curators from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery collaborating on the traveling exhibition Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350. The exhibition has opened in New York and will open in London on 8 March 2025.

Stephan is the John Pope-Hennessy Curator in Charge of European Paintings at The Met which he joined in 2015. He previously worked at the Museums at Harvard University, where he also completed his PhD, not knowing he would someday become a museum curator: “When I was a student, if you went to get a PhD, the goal was to be an academic though I was always fascinated by the experience of art.”

Laura, who was previously at the Getty Museum, joined the National Gallery in early 2020 where she is now Curator of Italian Paintings before 1500. Unlike Stephan, she knew right away she wanted to be on the museum track: “The museum always had enormous appeal because it’s a place for in depth, object-based research which can then be made available to a broad audience. I was fortunate that I did my graduate and PhD work at the Courtauld Institute of Art where direct study of the object was paramount.” She admits: “My PhD wasn’t the archetypal kind of ‘future museum curator’s PhD’, it was about nuns as patrons of the arts in the middle of 15^th century Florence!” Her studies in Florence also allowed her to obtain her first museum roles: “those experiences were real milestones because it’s very difficult to get museum experience unless you have museum experience.”

The exhibition’s gestation started before Laura joined the museum: “The exhibition is a project that was many years in the making. It started as a conversation between the former National Gallery curator Caroline Campbell and Professor Joanna Cannon, on the idea of an exhibition which looked at the reception of a Sienese painting in 19th and 20th century Britain. We all thought it was a great idea, but it also highlighted to us that no one had ever attempted to bring together the artworks of Duccio, Pietro, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, or Simone Martini, because no one thought that it could be done. However, The Met and the National Gallery have a wonderful core of works that could be built from and with our connections we could slowly try to have the ambition to do something that had just never been attempted.” Stephan adds: “It was a careful, thoughtful and methodical collaboration between our two institutions that moved the project forward. It was also uncannily topical when the world closed due to COVID-19 because the final moment of this exhibition, around 1350, is the moment of tremendous devastation through the pandemic plague that spread through Europe.”

While the exhibition is set in different venues, it was important for both museums that the show remain the same, with a comparable list of works: “At the National Gallery, we are putting the exhibition on in the Ground Floor galleries, which unlike the lofty and unified space of the Met, have low ceilings and individual rooms. The experience of the National Gallery would be more like entering a crypt or treasury rather than a cathedral.”

Laura and Stephan highlight the appeal of exhibiting works outside their native Italian environment: “The advantage is that the visitors can solely focus on the works themselves. We want to create an experience that’s singular and that helps the viewer have a very direct encounter with the objects. I think that’s one of our responsibilities when curating an exhibition. You can’t borrow things and not try to do something truly important and memorable with them, it’s almost unethical to do so.”

When asked about a favourite work, Laura describes herself as a fan of Simone Martini: “In fact each curator has a favourite. One of the memorable achievements of the show is bringing works of art that have long since been dispersed around the world back together for the first time. One of these ensembles is Simone’s Orsini Polyptych (1333-40), a portable folding devotional object made of 4 panels, that is now dispersed across collections in Antwerp, Berlin, and Paris. This little piece of splendour also allows us to explore the international reach of so many work in the exhibition which, because of their portable scale, were often found in places far from Siena.”

Both curators recognise the importance of philanthropy to achieve such a complex exhibition of delicate pieces: Stephan commented “There is no Met without the underpinning of foundational gifts by our supporters. Wonderfully, this collaboration between two institutions has been further bound together by this philanthropic arm that has crossed the Atlantic and supported the project on two poles.”