‘Ambition beyond words’: How Siena’s art revolution brought heaven down to earth

Before the Black Death devastated Siena, the city thrummed with energy, expressed in art and architecture designed to dazzle its audience – and which still astonishes 800 years laterIf you want to know the moment of a medieval Italian city’s greatest prosperity, look at the year it began work on its cathedral. In Siena, the magic year was 1226, the start of some 85 years of construction of the duomo, a remarkable gothic structure with an intricately complex, creamy pink facade and st