A Landscape of Fear
There were definite correspondances between the medieval city of Europe with its religious compounds and secular enclaves for knights or for merchants, its narrow, winding streets and its occasional vertical interruptions of the skyline and the medieval Arab-Islamic city. And then of course, there were European cities that acquired their medieval fabric under Islam, such as Palermo or Cordoba and the correspondance is more a matter of direct transmission. In both cases, that is in both Christian and Islamic cities on either side of the Mediterranean, the city that developed between the 7th and the 11th century reflects at once a strong sense of religious unity, due to the prominence of the religious monuments and spaces devoted to cult functions, while at the same time demonstrating in the snarled street patterns and lack of public infrastructure a profound ambiguity about political authority. With the rise of the Commune, the citizen-led municipal government of European cities that appears in the 11th to 14th centuries, the differences of the cities dominated by Islam and Christianity become more distinct.
There is no single way to explain it: religion alone is not the issue, nor are the differences of political and military organization. Geography, as always, plays a strong role, but without the historic events, that mixture of chance and will, geography cannot act on its own. In any event, Europe suffered from greater scarcity, and possessed a physically more divisive landscape than the Middle East. Vito Fumagalli, a historian of the so-called dark ages, describes the atmosphere in Europe before the rise of the communes as a "landscape of fear". One of his sources, Paul the Deacon in 680 describes what must have been a fairly common condition:
"In this year, plague, with swelling in the groin, again ravaged Ravenna, Grado and Istria, as it had 30 years earlier. Agilulf made peace with the Avars, but Childebert declared war on his cousin Chilperic's son. In the war between them as many as 30,000 men fell. A bitterly cold winter followed, the worst in memory. In the land of the Briones, blood fell from the clouds and flowed into the rivers." It is a dire report and with it you would have witnessed a devastated countryside that had been abandoned, woods and marshes reappropriating the terrain and making it impassible and unproductive, ruins of farms and ruins of cities; raggedy beggars and skinny people wandering the land like flocks of birds. In a further report the same writer despairs: "it was as if the world had returned to its very first days, when all was silence and no human voice or shepherd's whistle was yet heard in the countryside."
Hunger and pestilence were twin scourges, the one augmenting the other. And it is probably the hardest thing for us to identify with, even if we are periodically exposed to scenes of famine in Somalia and now Rwanda, and epidemics such as AIDS, it is hard to keep in mind amid the glories and monuments of western history that scarcity was always present. The only time in Houston we may become aware of the desparation that was endemic to pre-industrial societies is right before a hurricane is scheduled to hit: you go to the grocery store and find the shelves empty and feel a sinking sense of panic. But imagine a population of about 50 million, at least half of whom were subject to recurrent periods of famine. If you have ever gone without eating for more than a few days, you know that something interesting happens to your mind, you are prone to things like delirium and despair. Visions, the warping of reality, the bending of morality haunt those suffering from hunger. The hallucinations (some of them probably triggered by ergot, a type of mold that grows on grain), cannibalism, self-mutilation, denial and guilt that clouded the psyches of a large segment of the medieval population are catalogued in chilling detail in Piero Camporesi's book about hunger in Europe,The Bread of Dreams.
I mention this condition of scarcity to underline the state of alert that people must have felt in the hand to mouth condition, to help explain the defensive fragmentation of the land and of the city that resulted. The castle compound in the country and the castle compound in the city belonging to the feudal nobility, the lords and knights of the middle ages who constituted the military elite, were the elements of force that could easily exploit the starving class that worked the land in conditions worse than ancient slaves. The Church, which was the largest landowner and in some ways the cruelest feudal overlord, was also able to dominate that vast hemisphere of unreason, the mass hallucinations, and the irrational aspects of faith that were taken to extremes and augmented by a populace suffering from poor nutrition.
Ornatum and Eminent Domain
Last time we considered Bruges and Florence, two cities whose destinies for a while were connected by trade. As the diversification of their division of labor--the craftsmen, guildsmen, merchant organizations, and shopkeepers--increased, it forced the new order of the commune on the older fortified fragments and church compounds of the city. In both cities, the government of the commune made orders for demolitions--the earliest form of eminent domain--and created a series of magistrates to oversee the maintenance of water courses, bridges, and streets. Eminent Domain is when a governmental agency is allowed to condemn private property in the public interest, giving just recompensation. The clearing of the Piazza della Signoria in Florence during the 1260s occured as a form of punishment against the Uberti family, but the widening of Via dei Calzaioli 150 years later was an orderly process of eminent domain.
The urbanistic initiatives of medieval communes were done in the interest of public safety--Bruges pays for every third tile to insure against fires, Florence imposes a building code that all facades must be surfaced in stone for fire safety--but they also make reference in their legislation to something called "ornatum" in Latin, which in this context meant aesthetic improvement. Another word for it is decorum, or the appropriate looking solution. The idea that the city, and not just its monuments, could be treated as something of beauty opens up a new discourse of the city as a work of art, separated from Hellenism by over 1000 years and not consciously related to it. Tandem to this formal consideration is the new function of the city as a place of freedom, a guarantor of justice, a place where a public process will resolve conflicts and make the city safe from both internal and external threats. These two aspects, one formal the other social, make the Western medieval city distinct from other cities of the times. The Italian city states of the 13-15th centuries, beginning with Venice, but including about 2 dozen others, established a brief but brilliant example that is still serving the world as an example of a city ordered according to public interest.
Bologna and the Italian Commune
Today we will consider two more cities that came to prominence during the age of the Communes that corroborate this trend: Bologna and Siena. Bologna, like Florence, was a Roman town built on a grid that commanded a broad, centuriated agricultural landscape. It is often referred to as Bologna la Grassa, the fat, because of its situation in the most fertile area of Italy. The Roman city of Bononia never grew to larger than 15,000 people. Like Florence, which was also well-nourished by local agriculture, some of the city's success is due to its ability to overcome hunger. While there were hundreds of small cities with about 10,000 people they were too small to have the range of activities that will lead to a new urbanism. Bologna by the 13th had a population of close to 50,000.
The class conflicts that were noticed in 13th century Florence are still evident in Asinelli and Garisenda towers built for feudal families at the beginning of the 12th century. The Asinelli tower is as high as a 23 storey building and was originally part of a walled compound; the Garisenda tower was half as high but because it started to lean was left at this height. There were perhaps as many as 200 towers in medieval Bologna, more than in Florence, the town would have bristled like a porcupine. Why the two towers survived the transition to the Commune is not a question of attrition, for as in the other cities, laws against the towers of the nobility were enacted, in this case the Commune appropriated the towers for civic use as they are close to the Commune and the base of the Asinelli tower was rebuilt for public addresses.
In general the bishops were in control of the political power of Italian cities during the age of the towers. Any assemblies for popular questions, like the decision to fortify or go to war, were held in the cathedral or in the parvis space in front of the cathedral. As the population began to increase during the 11th century (this was partially due to the technical improvements in farming introduced by Benedictine monks, and partly due to the taming of wars and the subsidence of plagues) the power of the bishops and the feudal lords was increasingly brought into contest by what was often referred to as "conspiratio popoli" the people's conspiracy. Bishops were in some cases forced to rule with the consent of a citizen's group by the 11th century. The two most advanced cities from the point of view of trade, Venice and Genoa, each had instituted a form of representative republic run by the wealthy class of merchants by the end of the 11th century. The cities in Tucany and Lombardy would follow, Siena, in fact was one of the first, having an independent commune in 1071. The date of Bologna's commune foundation is not clear but was probably around the same time.
The creation of the Commune involved the guilds of the new merchant and crafts classes, who had already received organizational training and literacy in their self-governing labor societies and now demanded to have rights in the city as property owners. The issue was justice, protection, and representation. The merchant class wanted an inclusive system of justice and not one ordained by monarchical decrees. It wanted its labor to be defended and its trade routes to remain open. And it wanted to oversee the revenues of the city to make sure that they were administered equitably. They usually obtained as a group privileges from the Holy Roman Emperor that legitimated them as a power viable with the first two estates, the clergy and the landed nobility. The landed nobility, which tended to be less educated but better fortified than the merchant class, was allowed to participate in the early commune, but in almost every city was expunged from holding elected office by the end of the 13th century. This was to avoid the possible rise of powerful feudal lords within the communal structure who might impose themselves after an election as the lord of the city and become the eventual tyrant, exactly the sort that would emerge during the Renaissance. Although the participants of the new ruling class were relatively small, about 10% of the inhabitants of a city had the right to hold office, they handled themselves with extreme fairness and accountability, checking at every step to avoid corruption, cronyism, and extorsion.
The commune was based on a new notion of protected rights: right to work and do business, right to fair trial, right to own property and be a free citizen. As the new taxing authority the Commune was to guarantee the equitable use of revenues through accurate accounting, committees staffed by notaries and new judges and magistrates appointed by a citizens review process to monitor social grievances and disputes about property. Instead of the arbitrary and unfair methods of distribution used by the bishops and the feudal lords, the commune was to offer accountability for the city's collective actions, publishing all of its decisions. Although major decisions of the Comunne were taken through democratic process and her officers were elected to short terms through lotteries or elections, it was not a democracy in the modern sense, the electorate was limited to the ruling class of elite merchants, like the Great Council of Venice. This oligarchy had to demonstrate that it was accountable to the people and to themselves as the best provider of common welfare and justice. Architecture and urbanism, thus became crucial rhetorical tools to this class to make tangible signs of their legitimacy in a fragile political situation.
The commune of Bologna, which did not retain its autonomy for as long as the Tuscan citystates, is remarkable on two accounts. The first is an edict that was close to revolutionary, a law called the Libro del Paradiso (the book of Paradise) published in 1256. This edict offered freedom to all serfs in the Bologna territory, a move that almost instantly increased the city's population by 5000 people. This was a direct attack on the authority of the feudal nobility to bind the serfs to the land, and in compensation for acquiring a new proletariat, offered the city as the space to claim freedom.
The Porticoes of Bologna
The other remarkable aspect, the public encouragement of covered walkways, known as porticoes, came from the urban Statutes of 1249, which are allegedly the oldest known in Italy for public improvements. The law specificed that the porticoes must be maintained by the property owners (like sidewalks in the US) and that they must conform to minimum dimensions of nine feet in height (tall enough for a man on horseback). The law was probably based on the de facto use of porticoes, since it addresses the maintenance of existing proticoes, but it led to future legislation in 1289 that all property owners building new buildings had to build porticoes on properties that had them in the past.
This led to a curious kind of public armature, not as intentional as the Hellenistic porticoes we looked at in Constantinople or other ancient cities which were placed independently of buildings. The porticoes of Bologna, which has the world's greatest extensions of them, over 35 kilometers in total, were added piecemeal, each as in integral part of a facade of a building connecting as an open passage to the building next to it.
The evolution of this type of house with a portico can be picked out of the medieval fabric. The cantilevered overhang, which characterized cities with expanding populations that began to add new stories and get more square footage from the upper ones, this move known in Italian as "sporgenza" is particularly legislated against in most late medieval statutes. The 1452 statutes of Rome, for instance outlaw them specifically. In some Bolognese buildings you can see that the sporgenze cropped out farther than the cantilever was safe and was propped up with T structures as in the famous Isolani houses where wooden columns now frame a covered passage way.
On the road to one of the major churches, Santo Stefano, where the exterior pulpit is still in place to address the faithful, the heterogeneous collection of porticoes shows the 14th century absorbtion of the tradition into the planning of individual houses, each of a different scale but leaving the free passage between them. It achieves an urban poetic of the individual yielding to the collective while maintaining individuality. During the next century the Bolognese portico will become such a strong tradition in the city's way of building that several houses will share the same portico giving it a unified scale with identical columns from end to end. Even the major convents of the preaching orders, at least on one occasion encased their church, Santa Maria dei Servi (built in 1410), in a frame of porticoes in order to contribute to the system.
Probably the single most important event to change Bologna's urban destiny from a farming center to a city was the establishment in 1088 of the Studium, which along with that of Padua and that of Paris would become the most important educational center in Europe. It is estimated that during the 13th century the city hosted as many as 12,000 students per year who came from all over Europe to study law and medicine. 12,000 is a large segment of the population, perhaps a quarter, and it must have changed the city's complexion considerably, making it a youthful city. The university began under ecclesiastical supervision--as Jacque Le Goff explains, knowledge belonged to God and therefore teaching could not be treated as a paying job; teachers would hold courses in their own homes, or sometimes, like ancient Athens, would use the covered space of the porticoes for parapetetic excursions. Many of the greatest cultural figures of the age, including Dante, Petrarch, Alberti and Copernicus came to Bologna to study. Their teachers were known as Glossators (commentators) and among the city's curiosities are several mausolea raised on bases that look like pulpits, dedicated to a famous glossator.
As with the other independent communes during the 13th century a new plan for the central cathedral and for the civic building were conceived. Bologna, which has always been under closer church dominion than Florence or the Tuscan cities, placed the city hall and the Palace of the Podesta, much redone in the Renaissnce, on Piazza Grande, across from San Petronio. The cathedral was rethought several times by the comune, but as their power was snuffed the plans were not fully realised, which has created a curious meeting of gothic corners at the snipped off transcepts, and a haunting never finished facade, subject of a famous competition in the 16th century. The bishop's palace, which adjoins an earlier feudal castle, made a third facade for the city's major square. Between the cathedral and the Bishop's palace was a conspicuous palace reserved for the guild of the notaries built in 1385. That notaries would have such a prominent position in the city's center reflects their new status in a society of record keepers with many legal responsabilities. Notaries oversee such matters as protocol, budgets, elections and tax reports and are essential to the communal system of accountability that must be made evident to the rest of the city. There were over 2000 notaries in Bologna and they were the most educated people aside from the clergy. On the right flank of the cathedral was a unified portico called the Loggia dei Banchi built in 1410 for the various bankers and rebuilt by Vignola in the 16th century.
A five-minute walk through the busy commercial market district behind this portico would lead you to the Loggia dei Mercanti, built in florid gothic style in 1382. It addresses a wedge of open space with its marble balcony. It was the merchant guilds' meeting house, the place to establish weights and measures and discuss prices and investments. Bologna will be fought over by the church and local aristocratic families, in particular the Bentivoglio, each vying to be given authority over the city's insitutions. The Commune in its prime proved to be an ambitious sponsor of public space and new monuments. The statutes of the city, long after the more open regime of merchants lapsed left an indelible pattern and demand for the portico type that in its very nature diffused monumental focus and grandeur and reinforced the image of the city as a collective artifact. The greatest stretch of porticoes climbs up the hill from the city's edge to the church of San Luca, where a miraculous portrait of the Virgin attributed to St. Luke is housed, and an annual procession on the Saturday before Ascension day in May treks the 3 kilometers through the apocalyptic cypher of 666 bays of arches which were finished in 1739, long after the Comune had become a pawn of the Church.
Siena and the Nine
There are no unifying porticoes in Siena but the fabric of the city, composed of narrow streets, all paved either in brick or with grey flag stones, and lined by houses made of brick with some granite trim, has a unique sense of wholeness due to its scale and materiality. While a first impression of the winding streets may suggest that the city was a series of piecemeal accidents, the consistancy of the look of Siena, and the testimony of her statutes, reveals that the Commune was even more active than Bologna in effecting an urban aesthetic. The streets are geomorphic in their patterns, following the topographic lines of the hills like fluvial patterns, but the treatment of their edges and their third dimension is the result of intention and intervention, including the widening of the casato di sopra, analogous to the Florentine widening of via dei Calzaioli, only the curve was maintained instead of creating an orthogonal. In the statutes of Siena is this telling phrase: "...it responds to the beauty of the city of Siena and to the satisfaction of almost all people of the same city that any edifices that are to be made anew anywhere along the public thoroughfares...proceed in line with the existent buildings and on building not stand out beyond another, but they shall be disposed and arranged equally so as to be of the greatest beauty for the city." This is the reference to ornatum mentioned earlier.
The development of Siena's Commune during the 13th century cannot be seen independently from her more prosperous neighbor, Florence, 60 miles to the north. The two cities will be engaged in countless wars and rivalries during this period, sharing a common artistic and literary culture in such figures as Giotto, Bruneto Latini and Dante and mirroring a political experience of a bourgeois republic. As Florence was ruled by an elected council of Eight at the end of the 13th century, so Siena was ruled by a Council of Nine, the Noveschi, a self-defined political class drawn from the higher merchant guilds, to the exclusion of the feudal nobility and the lower crafts. The Noveschi will be in power for 70 years until 1355 and we will focus on their period because it is here that we find a strategy to link the art of city making, that is the application of a conscious urban aesthetic, with the theoretical maintenance of power.
Siena is located in very hilly terrain in Tuscany, an area without a river system and with severe water shortages. It did not grow from a Roman implant but may have had earlier Etruscan settlements. To compensate for its lack of a Roman past it adopted the symbol of the twins and the she-wolf, changing their names to Senus and Ascanius. Siena's urban development is attributable entirely to the Medieval period and thus, like Venice, could be used as an example of the quintessential medieval city. The three spokes of its pinwheel shape are reminders of how it underwent an urbanization process similar to ancient synoikismos, a process of neighboring communities agreeing to pool resources and live by the same rule. The highest of the hills, the Castellare, preserves in its name the idea of a lord's castle and became the site of the cathedral and bishop's palace. The second hill, San Martino stretches in the direction of Florence and it is here that the Florentines, once they conquered the city in 1555 will build a fortress to quell local opposition. The final third is located on the slope leading to Rome, the Camollia. The number three for these three primeval districts will affect all the multiples of representative positions and the iconic language of the city, including the encouragement of triforium windows (windows with two colonettes divided into 3 lights), and such designs as the paving pattern of the central piazza, the Piazza del Campo, with nine rays extending from the entrance to the Palazzo Pubblico.
Walking away from the center of Siena you can discover traces of its first set of walls, where the gateways have become archways in the very steep terrain; in one case a street actually passes over the old gate. The outdated walls were absorbed into the structure of an expanding city in its very tight fabric clinging to the hills. The new walls were part of a major public works program initiated under the Noveschi to improve the city's water supply, make the buildings safer, and create public confidence through monuments, especially with the rebuilding of the Cathedral and the construction of the city hall. All of these works were carried out during the period of the Noveschi or Nine, between 1287 and 1355, who oversaw three officials, the praetors, who were appointed to a yearly term to order street work and the building codes--they enforced minimal sizes for streets: 9 feet for a minor street and 22 feet for a major one. The government will effect a monopoly on bricks, insuring their quality and widespread use.
Looking at the map, the location of the great churches for the preaching orders is found outside the first set of walls and close to the edges of the new set, sited on terrain that was not built up and establishing new nodes of urban focus. Another addition to the city found out in these areas are the large water houses, publicly sponsored fountains, such as the fonte Ovile, which served as monuments to the Commune's struggle to solve the age-old impediment to Siena's development, its shortage of water. During the period of the Noveschi, 35 miles of tunnels were built to bring water in acqueducts and to drain out to the fields. 50 fountains were provided, several wells dug, a city mill was constructed, and road work on the major highways leading to the sea. Like Florence, Siena acquired its first source of capital from a combination of agriculture and wool production. The profits from these were used as the collateral of new lending institutions one of which would become the Monti dei Paschi, the oldest continuing in operation bank in the world (over 500 years old). Unlike Florence, however, which had the resources of a great river both for trading routes but especially for the large amounts of water needed to treat cloth, and accessible labor pool of the Arno valley, Siena was not able to develop its crafts activities to the industrial level that Florence did and never produced more than 10% of its rival cities' quota. The population of Siena thus stayed small as did its rate of economic growth to the point that it was an anomoly compared to the more advanced Florence. The Noveschi's obsession with the city's status can be gleaned from its codes for members who in their oath are required to "bring about the increase of growth and conservation of the rights and honors of your Comune." But the disadvantages of geography were too great to be overcome.
As in Florence the struggle with the feudal nobility is witness in the presence of chopped down towers. The families who built the towers were called "Casati" in Siena and they owned the major estates outside the city. They were categorically excluded from elective offices for fear they would gang up on the bourgeois and rt the government to tyranny. The requirements for holding public office were that they be adherents to the Guelph, Papal supporting, faction, as opposed the Ghibelline, emperor supporting faction, that they be over 30 years old and that they be "good and lawful merchants." Members of the Casati families could still influence policy through non-elected positions in the government. In some cases the antipathy between the two classes had blurred, such as in the case of the construction of the compound for the Salimbene family, the wealthiest of the Casati, as a great castle. The commune did not oppose this statement of individual power, but the Salimbene, through the use of the same stylistic details used on the Palazzo Pubblico showed a certain sympathy or cooperation between the aristocracy and the merchant regime.
Because of the anti-papal position of the Noveschi, the attitude to the local bishop was remote and unaccomodating. By the end of the 13th century, however, the Commune took it upon itself to rebuild the cathedral as a city monument and went so far as assessing the church for taxes for funds to maintain the roads. The new cathedral was to be even larger than the Duomo of Florence, and thus larger than St. Peter's in Rome. It used the city's colors of black and white in the striated bands as a motif for its masonry. Note the bell tower which shows a very sophisticated way of lightening the load as it moves up to the top, increasing the number of arches. Across from the Cathedral and bishop's palace was a large hospital, Santa Maria della Scala, built at this time by the state. Production on the cathedral was halted by the Black Death, the return of plague in 1348, which wiped out half of the population of Siena in three years. Siena, which counted about 55,000 inhabitants, never fully recovered from this loss of population, but even if it had, the Cathedral could not have been finished as planned since it was discovered that the foundations were faulty. Today just the shell of what would have been the major nave creates a wonderfully ambiguous outdoor room, perpendicular to the existing body of the church.
Piazza del Campo
If the Cathedral had been built as planned it would have been oriented more closely to the new center of the Commune. The Piazza del Campo, was a stretch of marshy land between the three hills of the city, chosen the way the Agora in Athens or the Republican forum in Rome were, as the neutral ground between competing hilltops. The site was drained in the 11th century and a retaining wall was built on which an early customs office was housed. The greatest work sponsored by the Noveschi was the new town hall, the Palazzo Pubblico and its surrounding shell-shaped plaza. It was begun in 1300, shortly after Florence's new town hall, and finshed three decades later. The campanile, the Torre del Mangia, is inordinately high as it must reach taller than the Cathedral's bell tower but it starts from a much lower point.
The Palazzo Pubblico is a monument to the ruling Noveschi, members of the upper merchant guilds who numbered about 4,000 of the 55,000 living in Siena. The ratio is curiously about the same as those who governed the Athenian city state during the time of Pericles, and about twice the percentage of those governing Venice. Physicians, lawyers, notaries, and the nobles from the Casati could participate in the city bureaucracies and the the Council of the Bell, a group of 300 citizens who essentially rubbered stamped all policies coming from the Noveschi.
The multiples of three are everywhere present. The plan of Palazzo Pubblico is tripartite: the left wing for the Podesta, the central wing for the Council and bureaucracies, and the right wing for the Noveschi, who during their two month terms were required to live in the palace, a move that both prevented lobbying, and made government visible. The windows of the palace are all triforium and by law "if any house or palace around the Palazzo Pubblico shall be rebuilt each and every one of those windows of the said house or palace which looks upon the Campo shall have small columns and shall not be made in any form of balcony." It actually didn't specify triforium, but looking at what was built, such as Palazzo Sansedoni, that is how it got interpretted. And the paving pattern as we have already mentioned is an iconic reminder of the Nine.
In order to finance their great public works, the Noveschi instituted a financial measure that will become the basis of most modern municipalities, the income tax, by which property was assessed and taxes made accordingly. This began in 1320 and was later copied by Florence. The city also instituted a policy of voluntary or forced loans, called the Monte, developing a tradition of public debt, akin to that in Venice, that will lead to the state-owned bank of Monte dei Paschi.
Lorenzetti's Good and Bad Governement
In the meeting chamber of the Noveschi, the Sala della Pace, is one of the great documents of the political ideology of a medieval citystate, part inscription and part painting, known as the cycle of Good and Bad Government. The frescoes were painted in 1340 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, who was evidently a member of the group of the ruling class and known, aside from his skill as an artist, for his wide knowledge of political theory. It is an extraordinary painting, quite unlike anything that came before or after it: it combines realistic visions of the landscapes of the good city and of the bad city with allegorical formulas of the virtues needed to accomplish good government. Using pre- perspectival spatial recession, Lorenzetti creates a marvelously unified view of the city and the country. The painting is a manifesto, and like all propaganda was intended as a reinforcing vision to those who were already convinced-- a lesson for the members of the Nine, who rotate every two months, reminding them of their values and goals.
I want to spend some time analysing Lorenzetti's painting as a way of concluding about the Medieval city. You were meant to view it from left to right, from the Bad city to the good city. The wall devoted to the Bad city is a reminder of the "Landscape of Fear" mentioned earlier from which society had emerged. It is inhabited by monsters, commonly reported in the harder times before the year 1000. Flying above the city gate is a ragged harpy figure labeled "Timor", or Fear, who brandishes a sword and carries a sign reading "Because each seeks only his own good, in this city, Justice is subjected to Tyranny; wherefore along this road nobody passes without fearing for his life, since there are robberies outside and inside the city gates." Below her we see the countryside ablaze with burning buildings and looting, abandoned fields, bridges blocked by soldiers. The gate to the city is also blocked by soldiers and inside the city is a mess, buildings are being torn apart, people are fighting, women are being raped. This city is like Dante's description of hell as "una citta dolente," a suffering city, and lives up to the city of the old feudal order. Next to the scene of the Bad city are the allegories of bad government with the horned figure of Tyranny in the center and with Justice bond at his or her feet.
On the next wall is the allegorical chart of Good Government where the figure of Justice as a fulcrum for the scales, is balanced with the crowned figure of il Buon Comun (the common good); they are linked by a rope, which passes by a figure named Concord (a pun for "with the rope") and 24 well-fed figures holding on to the rope in solidarity. The figure of peace, lounging on armor occupies the center of the composition and has given her name to the room. The appeal to justice is everywhere: "This holy virtue (justice) wherever she rules, induces to unity the many souls of citizens and they gather together for such a purpose to make the Common Good their Lord. Quite literally common good has precedence over self-interest. The picture makes clear that this is not a regime based on amnesty: justice is seen beheading those who deserve it and opposite the burghers is the city's militia having captured the thieves and enemies of the state and put them in chains: one of the major construction projects of the age will be the prison added to the rear of the Palazzo Pubblico.
Finally there is the portrait of the Good city, an idealization of Siena that showed it not in realistic detail but in rhetorical detail. As an answer to the other wall's Timor is the inscription Securitas (safety) and a blithe victory figure semi-clad holding a gallows and flying over the city gate with the inscription: "Without fear every man may travel freely and each may till and sow, so long as this commune shall maintain this lady Justice as sovereign, for she has stripped the wicked of all power." The composition is divided into two equal parts as if to say that the good city is an isomorphic balance of the city with its territory.
Inside the walls of the city, which has only a few identifiable details that make it Siena, like the campanile of the Duomo and the figure of the she-wolf over the gate. It is quite interesting that unlike renaissance views of the ideal city, Lorenzetti's ideal city boisterously full of people, dense to the point of bursting with a heterogenious variety of buildings, and unfinished. The message is much more about letting things be than forcing them into a new geometric order. There are no spaces as coherent as the Piazza del Campo (which incidently was paved five years after the painting) in the picture, but rather the casual collection of buildings, open at their base for business and with a multitude of windows. The population is a mix of nobles shown on horseback, merchants and shopowners and the popolino or peasants. There are no clergy present, nor any soldiers, which is quite contrary to the demographic statistics which would show several thousand religious people and at least 3000 troops used as police for the Commune. The nobles all seem to be leaving the city--they are free to circulate but in one view are leaving a gate in a wedding party and in another are going out of the gate to the hunt. In the archways of the shops you will find a wine shop where people are playing chess, a goldsmiths, a tailor, a shoemaker, a teacher with his class. The peasants are bringing wood and produce. Merchants have mules loaded with sacks, there are mean and women working on looms in the background. It is a city of work and exchange that is not immune to play or children and seems wonderfully free from conflict. The most bizarre set of out of proportion figures, nine girls dancing while one beats a tamburine, is clearly an allegory perhaps of the harmony of the Noveschi. There were laws against public dancing or wearing suptuous outfits in public. The buildings in the cityscape mostly have biforium windows, with flowerpots in them; there is construction going on, a sign of a healthy economy then as now, since a significant part of the economy was linked to the building trades.
Outside the gate we find the falconer, whose realistic turning of the body indicates a modern conception of space. Near him is a beggar and farmers bringing pigs and produce to merket. The countryside is well tended with villas and farms. Merchants are coming to the city across a bridge, and everything looks well watered. The allegorical nature of the picture is made clear by the presence of farmers planting in one part of the landscape and harvesting in another. In the distance is the sea, indicating Siena's port town of Talamone. The message is clear that in order to maintain prosperity, the Noveschi must continue to sponsor the maintenance of the roads. As the city had suffered a famine the year before the painting was begun, the abundance of the countryside is clearly a myth, that a coherent water policy was trying to substanstiate. Both the vision of the country and that of the city was recognizable as Siena, yet clearly one in which social conflicts and scarcity had dissolved. The ideology that the regime can justify its monopolization of power only if it serves an accountable system of justice penetrates all levels of this vision.
The quick overthrow of the Noveschi in 1355 after the devastating years of plague and the external support of the French, showed that their regime was not as harmonious or stable as the city projected on the wall would have us assume. Though they included the casati nobles to some degree, the jealousy between classes often reemerged in anarchic outbursts, and the lower classes could likewise be easily mobilized against the Noveschi, since they felt that their taxes were being misappropriated for officials salaries and payment of mercenaries, among whom was the police force of 3,000 troops.
The Noveschi followed a conscious aesthetic and political program underlined by the fact that they contracted Lorenzetti to create a unique work of art to describe the republic as a work of art. They left behind a series of impressive interventions, both monumental and infrastructural, that pushed the city to its limit of development beyond which it would never venture until recent times. There is an inscription in the large hall used for the Council of the Bell, underneath Simone Martini's picture of the Virgin, the city's great emblem and patron saint, which sums up the new attitude of the merchant class to the city: "Those who strive hard for a beautiful and honorable adornment of their city are worthy of praise and commendation. Without order, no good thing is done, and you are the people who ought to give order and rule to the whole city." Beauty became a civic mission for the Noveschi, a rhetorical tool to capture the imagination of the city and legitimate the rule of a post-feudal order, where justice and not force or religious authority would be used as the basis of authority.
Sources:
Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics, New York, 1969.
Vito Fumagalli, Landscapes of Fear, Perceptions of nature and the City in the Middle
Ages, trans. Shayne Mitchell, Cambridge, 1994.
Piero Camporesi, The Bread of Dreams,
William Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena under the Nine, 1287-1355,
Berkeley, 1981.
R. Starn and L. Partridge, Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600, Berkeley,
1992
Daniel Waley, Siena and the Sienese in the Thirteenth Century, Cambridge,
1991.
Richard Ingersoll
Last Updated: 10.5.95
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