The Allegory of Good and Bad Government

• 1. Introduction

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  The Allegory of Good and Bad Government is a series of fresco panels that Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted between February 1338 and May 1339 in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico. They hang in the Sala dei Nove, the council chamber where nine magistrates governed the Republic of Siena. Those magistrates sat in that room day after day, and the paintings surrounded them on three of its four walls. Scholars have interpreted the work as designed to remind those nine officials of just how much was at stake in every decision they made.

  Siena in the fourteenth century was no backwater. It was one of the most powerful Italian city-states, an urban hub dense with bankers and merchants. Yet the era was also defined by violent party struggles, frequent overthrows of governments, and the looming catastrophe of the Black Death. Why did Lorenzetti reach for allegory rather than scripture? What did he put in those vast panels? And what can the eyes of a painted figure of Justice tell us about how a medieval mind understood sight itself?

• 2. A Room Built for Power

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  Lorenzetti covered three of the four walls of the Sala dei Nove with his cycle. The southern wall was left bare because it holds the room's only window. The door the councilors used to enter stood on the northern wall, and from that threshold they faced a panorama of governance, virtue, and ruin.

  The arrangement was deliberate. The eastern wall carried the Effects of Good Government. The western wall held the Allegory and Effects of Bad Government. On the northern wall, above the door, presided personifications of the virtues of good government, looking down on both the scenes of flourishing and decay. A councillor walking into the room would pass beneath those virtues and find themselves flanked on either side by the consequences of heeding or ignoring them. The six individual scenes the cycle contains all carry titles that are modern labels, not Lorenzetti's own. His signature, however, survives in Latin along the lower border of the Good Government allegory: Ambrosius Laurentii De Senis Hic Pinxit Utrinque.

• 3. The Allegory of Good Government

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  The composition of the central allegorical panel divides into three horizontal bands stacked one above the other. In the foreground, figures representing the citizens of Siena carry the roles of civic officers and magistrates. They are linked by two woven cords, or concords, that gather from beneath the scales of Justice. On a raised stage behind them sit allegorical groups representing Good Government itself, connected to the foreground by a procession of councilors.

  Above all of them, in the heavenly band at the top, float bodiless figures of the virtues. Wisdom sits directly above the central enthroned figure, who embodies the Commune of Siena. That figure holds an orb and a scepter and wears the colors of the Balzana, the black-and-white Sienese coat of arms. Around his head are the letters C S C V, standing for Commune Saenorum Civitatis Virginis, identifying him as the council of Siena made flesh. Faith, Hope, and Charity guide him, while six crowned female figures named Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity, Temperance, and Justice stand flanking him.

  At the ruler's feet, two children play. They may represent Ascius and Senius, the sons of Remus who founded Siena according to Roman legend, or they may be Romulus and Remus, founders of Rome. The text running along the lower border spells out what this scene promises: "This holy virtue, where she rules, induces to unity the many souls of citizens, and they, gathered together for such a purpose, make the Common Good their Lord."

• 4. The Peaceful City and Country

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  On the longer wall of the room, the Effects of Good Government stretch from a panoramic city scene out through a gate and into the Tuscan countryside beyond. This painting is the first accurate panoramic view of city and country since antiquity. Scholars can identify it as Siena rather than a generic backdrop, unlike the ambiguous settings common in other works of the time.

  The city is clustered with palaces, markets, towers, churches, streets, and walls recalling ancient Roman urban murals. Traffic moves without violence. Guild members pursue their trades. A wedding procession winds through the streets, and women dance gracefully in the middle of a public square. Dancers carried associations with springtime ritual, and they also served as a metaphor for peaceful civic life. The text along the lower edge of this wall addresses the viewer directly, commanding those who govern to look at Justice, crowned and rendering to everyone their due, and to see how many goods derive from her.

  The fresco then dissolves into the Peaceful Country. An entourage passes through the city gate and out to a bird's-eye view of the Tuscan countryside, with villas, castles, plowed farmland, and peasants going about their work. The winged allegorical figure of Security hovers above the landscape, holding an unfurled scroll. Its text promises that without fear every man may travel freely and till and sow, so long as the commune maintains Justice as sovereign.

• 5. Cosmic Order and the Labors

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  Lorenzetti embedded a cosmological argument inside the decorative borders of the three frescos. Medallions running along those borders depict personifications of the planets and the seasons. Above the Effects of Good Government, the medallions follow the natural order of the seasons and the alignment of the planets in sequence.

  Within the fresco itself, citizens perform the monthly labors that correspond to those seasons: fishing and tending vines in March, cultivating soil and planting in April, riding in May, plowing and stock rising in June, harvesting cereals in July, threshing in August, and hunting in September. The labors of winter and fall also appear, though they depart from the conventional way such tasks were shown at the time.

  Scholars hypothesize that beyond depicting seasonal work, Lorenzetti was showing the allegorical children of each planet. Mercantile activities belonged to Mercury's children. For Venus, Lorenzetti chose to depict a bride, weavers, and dancers rather than her more carnal associations. The children of Mars, defined by weapons, appear as knights and guards. Saturn's children are ploughmen, diggers, and threshers, with his other, more troublesome children omitted. Jupiter's children appear as hunters. By selecting only the children who would reinforce peace, Lorenzetti shaped the fresco into an argument: performing the right tasks in alignment with nature ensures a stable commonwealth. Half of the planetary medallions appear over the scene of war too, a reminder of what happens when citizens act out of accordance with that order.

• 6. Venus and the Dancers

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  Ten dancers at the center of the Effects of Good Government fresco have generated sustained scholarly debate. Lorenzetti's contemporaries held that Venus existed in two forms: as a legitimate planetary deity or as the nude goddess born from the sea. In the borders of the fresco cycle, the other planets appear in both of their houses. Venus is placed only in Taurus, her daytime house, a choice that anchors her to her celestial and legitimate aspect.

  Her modest dress reinforces this. Rather than appearing nude, she is depicted clothed, and her children in the fresco inherit the associations of that form: chastity, matrimonial love, friendship, and sociability. The dancers' movements echo the arm gestures of Venus herself, and their larger scale compared to the nearby wedding party gives them visual prominence.

  Their path through the fresco follows a continuous serpentine trajectory that scholars have linked to both an S-shaped form associated with Siena and to the lemniscate, the infinity sign, symbolizing balance and renewal. What makes their presence particularly pointed is a set of Sienese statutes issued in 1338, the very same year Lorenzetti began painting. Those statutes prohibited public dancing and restricted the wearing of silk. Yet the dancers in the fresco wear silk.

• 7. Justice and Perspective

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  Looking at the Effects of Good Government, a viewer notices that the cityscape and the scale of the figures do not conform to any single rational perspective scheme. Two competing explanations have been put forward. One holds that the skewed perspective originates from a point centered on the figure of Tyranny on the opposite wall, so that the Good Government scene radiates outward from that dark center in a radial scheme.

  The second and more widely accepted explanation derives the perspective from Justice's line of gaze. Unlike the other virtues, who sit upright and look into space or toward each other, Justice directs her eyes across the room toward the corner. Photographs taken along that sight line show that the buildings and figures in the fresco fall into a coherent perspective when viewed from her vantage. The science of optics in fourteenth-century Siena supports this reading further. The Sienese word for vision meant both the physical act of seeing and the image the mind constructed from it. Light carried a dual meaning as well, describing both physical and spiritual illumination. In that intellectual framework, Justice's gaze does not merely look at the peaceful city; it creates and illuminates it.

• 8. The Reign of Tyranny

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  The Effects of Bad Government fresco survives in worse condition than the others. The wall it occupies was once an exterior wall, and moisture has damaged it heavily over the centuries. Despite that, the central figure is unmistakable: a devious figure adorned with horns and fangs, cross-eyed, sitting enthroned with his feet resting on a goat, a symbol of luxury, while holding a dagger. This figure is identified as Tyrammides, or Tyranny.

  Below him, Justice lies bound and captive. Flanking Tyranny are Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division, and War. Above him float Avarice, Pride, and Vainglory, which an advice book for city magistrates of the time named as the leading enemies of human life. The planetary presiders here are Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, the less favorable of the planets by contemporary belief. The Roman Emperor Nero also appears among the tyrannical company.

  Lorenzetti made the scene harder to read by presenting it from right to left, reversing the natural direction and creating a sense of discomfort in the viewer. Windows gape open, houses are being demolished, and commerce has vanished from the streets except for the one remaining business: the armourer's shop. The streets are empty. In the countryside beyond, two armies advance toward each other. The scene functions as the diametrical opposite of the peaceful city, and that opposition was the whole point for the nine men who governed Siena every day in its shadow.