Jed Perl in The New Republic:
There is a heart-stopping intimacy about Duccio’s Madonna and Child, a new acquisition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The little panel, less than a foot high, dates from around 1300, when a few Italian artists were beginning to take an interest in the visual possibilities of raw, unfettered emotion–emotion that was not ritualized or abstracted. Duccio gives the interactions of a mother and a child a pungency and a delicacy that’s startlingly–disarmingly–familiar.
More here.
