AMBROSIUS LAURENTII DE SENIS HIC PINXIT UTRINQUE: the inscription, in fine gothic letters, fills the white ribbon that runs along the ground beneath the feet of the twenty-four councillors. It is spread out above our heads, and so we need to look up a bit in order to read it: Ambrogio Lorenzetti, of Siena, painted this, utrinque. ‘On two sides’, or, perhaps more precisely, ‘on one side and the other’ – in other words: Ambrogio Lorenzetti of Siena painted this and that. A strange detail, to which we will need to return. For the time being, we shall just note the solemn nature of the signature, and the fact that it is heightened by the use of Latin. In the word-saturated picture, Latin is reserved solely for the inscriptions which label the virtues and give the artist’s name; the inscriptions in verse in the scrolls and the decorative borders commenting on the allegories are, by way of contrast, in the vernacular. Daniel Russo is doubtless correct in his suggestion that this mark of attribution needs to be seen as part of the long tradition of inscriptions that, from at least the twelfth century onwards, place ‘the completed work of art and the humble mention of its maker under the eye of God’, while emphasizing that ‘if there is a signature in [Lorenzetti’s] work, a constantly repeated signature, it is the number nine, which refers via the painter to the Nine magistrates who commissioned it and paid for the entire decoration’.1 All the same, while this act of naming should be seen as akin to ancient and venerable forms of monumental inscription, and we should not overestimate the importance of the artist’s signature (he had less auctoritas than those who commissioned the work), it is difficult not to see it as a claim being made by the auctor, less under the eye of God (which does not hang too heavily over the scene here) than under the gaze of human beings and their future.
The painter who signs his name in Latin embodies, for posterity, the model of the artist-philosopher. A hundred years after the completion of the Sienese fresco, Lorenzo Ghiberti described him in his Commentaries as a famosissimo e singularissimo maestro but also ‘a very noble composer’ (nobilissimo compositore) and also as a huomo di grande ingegno (‘an extremely ingenious man’). Lorenzetti, he said, was an unrivalled draughtsman, ‘much more gifted than the others’, skilled in the art of composition. When he wrote these lines, Ghiberti had just finished the Gates of Paradise for the Baptistery of Florence (1425), a major composition of the Italian Renaissance which tried to adapt to the art of sculpting in bronze the investigations that painters had been conducting into the narrative structure of depicted scenes. From this point of view, Ghiberti deemed Lorenzetti to be a master. But his ingegno was not just an art of execution: Fu nobilissimo disegnatore, fu molto perito nella teorica di detta arte.2 That is the main point: while Lorenzetti’s work was studied and admired in the quattrocento for the skill of its perspectival construction, it was also considered to be an ingenious painting, and its author as one of those precursors who raised the condition of painters from the level of the mechanical arts, to which the tradition had confined them, to the level of the liberal arts, to which they belonged thanks to their mathematical treatment of space. Ghiberti’s use of the term teorica is decisive: it is in becoming a theorist of his art that the painter achieves the dignity of the intellectual. This is the meaning of Ghiberti’s Commentarii, the first theoretical treatise written by a painter. But as Richard Krautheimer has noted, Ghiberti does not use the term teorica except on very rare occasions: only the Ancients, Lorenzetti, and he himself can be called ‘expert in the theory of this art’ (perito nella teorica detta arte).3
We find a similar conclusion in Giorgio Vasari. A hundred years after Ghiberti, Vasari describes Lorenzetti as an artist and ‘gentleman’: he was ‘an excellent master in painting’, but also had
given attention in his youth to letters […] wherefore he was not only intimate with men of learning and of taste, but he was also employed, to his great honour and advantage, in the government of his Republic. The ways of Ambrogio were in all respects worthy of praise, and rather those of a gentleman and a philosopher than of a craftsman.4
Here too, it is easy to recognize in these lines the projection of a social ideal characteristic of Vasari and his time. But here too, the author of the Lives was not making it all up; he was recomposing fragments of accumulated memories that, in the second half of the sixteenth century, formed the available stock of reminiscences of Lorenzetti. He had ‘given attention in his youth to letters’ – this was indisputably true of the Sienese painter. On 9 June 1348, at the end of his life, he himself wrote, in his own hand, his will (scritto su una carta di pecora per volgaro, scritto per mano di maestro Ambruogio, as the document puts it).5 The plague that would soon kill him was already causing such havoc in the city of Siena that, according to the text, it was no longer possible to find a single notary to transcribe under dictation the last will and testament of the dying. Conversely, in 1335, an account from the workshop of the Duomo recorded the payment made by the commune to a grammar teacher to translate a hagiographic text in Latin, meant to provide a source of inspiration for the storie di San Savino painted by Pietro Lorenzetti.6 Unlike his older brother, Ambrogio had no need of those cultural mediators, as he had direct access to the written culture – both in Latin and in the vulgar tongue.
Of course, this does not mean that Ambrogio Lorenzetti was the fresco’s sole designer. As we know, or can at least surmise, the verses of the inscriptions in the fresco and the ‘song’ in the decorative borders, to which we will shortly be returning, are the work of an experienced poet. This poet’s identity is still unknown, as is that of the councillors who devised – according to what procedures? – the fresco’s political programme. Ambrosius Laurentii de Senis: a single proper name, demonstrating the trust and esteem the political regime of the Nine granted to its artists, but also doubtless designating a collective identity, basically in line with communal ideology. If we wish, like Quentin Skinner, to draw the portrait of ‘the artist as a political philosopher’, and if we wish to do so without committing the usual anachronism of projecting the figures of Vasari’s age back onto mediaeval realities, we need to accept that this will be a group portrait – or, more precisely, the portrait of a group and a time, a situated collective group.7 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, a learned painter, certainly had the cultural means to interpret the iconographic programme proposed to him, however elaborately it had been worked up, and to adapt it more or less freely. We cannot say any more about the painter’s political judgement – apart from noting that Vasari’s remark that he had been employed ‘in the government of his Republic’ is partly confirmed by the sources, as we know that in 1347 Lorenzetti was elected to the Consiglio dei Paciari (one of the organs of the communal administration) and gave a speech in it on 2 November defending a proposal to reinforce the authority of the Captain of the People. The notary’s minutes record the speech by Magister Ambrosius Laurentii and merely add that he gave the assembly the benefit of sua sapientia verba (sic: ‘his wise words’).8 A speech in favour of the popular institutions of the city; and a speech that was deemed to be eloquent by the notary who recorded the deliberations that followed – these are tenuous signs, but they point in the same direction.
We cannot use this as evidence for reconstituting how big a role Lorenzetti played in the development (or interpretation) of the iconographical programme for the Sala della Pace: the state of the documentation available is not good enough. As we have seen, this documentation gives information solely about the payments made between the end of February 1338 and the end of May 1339, when he received 55 florins ‘as the balance of his wages’. This sum, paid out once the work was completed – and, if necessary, once the conformity of the work to the instructions in the commission had been verified by experts – generally corresponded to the execution of the ‘price made’: that is, the payment of half the overall price of the work as fixed by contract. In Siena, the agreement was not always notarized; if so, in this case it has not been preserved. On reading the structure of the payments, we can surmise that provision had been made for an overall sum of 110 florins, half payable at the end, and the other in 10-florin advances every two months paid by the financial administration of the Biccherna from the time work began, so as to ensure its smooth running. For this price did not include merely the artist’s ‘wages’: he had to use this sum to pay for pigments, material and perhaps also the wages of several aides and apprentices. The other non-standardized payments recorded (2 florins on 28 July 1338, 6 florins on 18 February 1339 – the latter amount probably marking the work’s effective completion) doubtless corresponded to adjustments or regularizations for a labour whose overall cost (113 florins) will barely have exceeded the sum stipulated in the contract.9
Labour, building site, contract: on reading the bills of payment of the Biccherna of Siena, we start to gain an idea of Lorenzetti’s social identity that is quite different from the sovereign image of the ‘artist-gentleman’ that Giorgio Vasari, the man who was at home in princely courts and acted as the impresario of Medici pomps, wanted to create of him. In the first half of the fourteenth century, the model of the building site was still the basis for social practices regulating the relations between those commissioning the work and the painter, who was not yet integrated into the official world. For, in this type of contact, ‘it is labour for which one is paid, and not for the work of art itself’: the latter had no price to speak of, except for the price of the time one had taken to fashion it.10 Painting his Maestà for the cathedral, Duccio was initially paid 16 sous per day, before being paid per figure. The advances paid to Lorenzetti were in florins, the Florentine currency that, thanks to its stability, had become the international standard for commercial trade; this was already a privilege, as the statutes of 1337–9 specified that the commune should generally pay its wages (especially the wages it paid to its mercenaries) in Sienese lire. It has been calculated that Lorenzetti’s different public commissions brought him in an annual salary of 280 lire. This was a tidy sum: in comparison, in 1333, a man working on the Palazzo Pubblico received 6 lire per month, and the treasurers of the Biccherna 100 lire per annum. But the total sum of 113 florins (some 357 lire) for the painting of the Sala della Pace can also be compared with other investments: the Nine spent almost as much (329 lire) on the candles for their chapel in 1338 alone, and, the following year, they paid 6,000 florins to Jacopo di Vanni for bringing water to the square of the campo.11
We still need to understand how Lorenzetti’s ‘great reputation’ (as ‘an excellent master in painting’) was socially constructed: this was the third branch of the laurel wreath with which Vasari crowned the Sienese painter. The fresco in the Palazzo Pubblico formed the pinnacle of an artistic career that lasted thirty years, from 1319 (the date of the first Madonna to be attested: the Madonna and Child of Vico l’Abate, now in the Museo di Arte Sacra in San Casciano Val di Pisa) to his death in 1348. After a few commissions from Florence, this career was, from 1335, exclusively pursued in Siena, and increasingly depended on public commissions.12 Even if historians probably exaggerate its importance (because it is public sources that predominate in the documents and in the historiography that draws on them), it was public commissions that structured the market of fame. Duccio, Simone Martini, Pietro and Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Vasari’s litany of the great names in Sienese painting corresponds to the succession of hegemonic positions on the market of public commissions. It was this which regulated the circulation of artists between the construction sites of the commune, the cathedral, the Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala and, to a lesser degree, the great churches of the Mendicant Orders. It presupposed the organization of painting workshops in which the names of the masters appeared as ‘brands’ that disguised the collective dimension of artistic labour. Not until the 1330s did there appear a first generation of second-rank painters whose names have been preserved: the brothers Lippo and Andrea Vanni, Niccolò di Ser Sozzo, Bartolomeo Bulgarini, and so on.
If we set aside his prolific production of Madonnas, though this was a decisive factor in the construction of his renown as a learned painter and the development of his subtle art of arranging figures in space, Lorenzetti mainly owes his fame as a ‘political’ painter to his great narrative cycles painted as frescos. Even here, we need to ensure we are using the words correctly: we are giving the label ‘fresco’ to the painting with which Lorenzetti decorated the Sala della Pace in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, since the common usage of the term now covers every kind of mural painting. But his work here is, technically speaking, not a fresco: Lorenzetti actually painted it a tempera: that is, by soaking a dry wall (a secco) with an emulsion binder such as egg yolk. Painting a fresco, on the other hand, consists in applying pigments ‘in the fresh’ of the coating before it has time to dry. This technique, which requires more rapid execution, generally ensures a greater degree of stability for the pictorial matter – and this is why, when Lorenzetti’s work was repainted in 1492, as it had quickly deteriorated, it was done so a buon fresco.13
In 1335, Ambrogio and his brother Pietro painted the frescos (now vanished) in Ospedale Santa Maria della Scala. This was a first stage in his gaining a public commission, since the fabbrica of the Ospedale Maggiore di Siena had, since 1309, been taken over by the communal administration, following the model of the ‘works of the cathedral’, which, in communal Italy, were civic building sites integrated into the council management of the authorities. The same could be said of the great church of San Francesco which Ambrogio decorated with his Storie di santi e martiri francescani (stories of Franciscan saints and martyrs) in 1336–7. After this date, he occupied the place left vacant by Simone Martini’s departure for Avignon, even if his workshop was less economically important. In any case, he could gain more frequent access to the heart of the communal state by taking over responsibility for the iconographic programmes laid down by the civil authorities. According to the chronicler Agnolo di Tura del Grasso, in 1337 he painted frescos of Storie romane (Roman stories) on the outer wall of the communal palace, not far from the newly rebuilt prisons.14 Then came the commission for the Sala della Pace, this time inside the communal palace – a palace which, in some ways, he would never leave until his death in 1348. In 1340, Lorenzetti was given a public commission to decorate the loggia of the palace with a Madonna in Maestà con le quattro virtù cardinali (Madonna in majesty with the four cardinal virtues), and in 1345 he painted a map of the world which Ghiberti described as ‘a cosmography, depicting the whole of the inhabited world’; this work has since been lost, but it still gives its name to one of the halls of the Palazzo Pubblico. There were Virgins in majesty but also, perhaps, there was a realistic representation of castles and fortified villages in the same Sala del Mappamondo – not to mention Lorenzetti’s biccherne, painted wooden tablets serving as a cover for the registers of the financial administration: the series of these, produced continuously since 1258, is one of the great Sienese expressions of the relation between art and administration,15 and Ambrogio had now turned himself into a full member of the tradition of civic art in Siena. And it was also for the Palazzo Pubblico that Brother Francesco de San Galgano, the camerlengo (chamberlain) of the administration of the tax department at the Biccherna, commissioned him to paint his 1344 Annunciation, now in the Pinacoteca of Siena; the highly subtle perspectival construction of this work, with its single vanishing point, was still being studied and admired in the quattrocento.
Because the exact moment depicted in the Annunciation designates the sudden, stupefying irruption of divine infinity into the mortal finitude of Mary’s womb, and thus of the incommensurable into the measurable, it is also a place where painters can experiment with the mathematical treatment of space. Daniel Arasse has demonstrated this with brio, while incidentally criticizing the famous hypothesis of Erwin Panofsky, who saw Ambrogio’s Annunciation as the prototype of modern artificial perspective in which painters arrange all the vanishing traces so that they head towards a single horizon, something which the narrowing of the tiling on the floor away from the spectator makes clearly visible.16 These days, it is more commonly held that it is in his brother Pietro’s work that we find, from the strictly technical point of view, the most promising advances in centralized, unifocal perspectival construction – especially in the Nativity of the Virgin (1335–42), which he painted for the San Savino altar in the Duomo of Siena.17
Pietro the illiterate, the one who needed others to read out the legends that he was to depict in painting, and not the doctus pictor (learned painter) Ambrogio: we will need to bear this in mind when we patiently scrutinize the details in the paintings of the Sala della Pace, trying to reconstitute the political messages they skilfully communicate. For painting is at its most eloquent when it draws on its own methods, and not when it attempts to devise images for a discourse that has been fabricated elsewhere, in the implacable ordering of texts. Hence this detail, noticed by Arasse: take a look at the gold ring hanging from the Virgin’s ear. Ever since the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), ear-rings were one of the distinguishing marks imposed on Jewish women in Italian cities. And Mary was definitely Jewish at the time she received the message of the Angel Gabriel: when she went to present her child in the Temple, she was respecting the Law of Moses. With a few brush-strokes, taking from the golden background of his composition just enough to heighten the Virgin’s lobe with a luxuriously defamatory sign, Lorenzetti painted the tipping point between Law and Grace.18 It is in this sense, too, that the ‘trusted painter of the Nine’ can be described as learned painter, and these two virtues – political fidelity and cultural mastery – converge in the notion of a civic art of which the historiographical tradition has made the fresco known as ‘Good Government’ an unsurpassable horizon.
The Annunciation was Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s final painting. With him died, on 6 April 1348, the last survivor of a whole generation of painters and scholars exterminated by the Black Death. In Siena, the plague was so brutal and devastating that it cut a great swathe through the pyramid of the ages, which for a long time thereafter would remain, like a gaping inconsolable absence.19 In any event, the Black Death drew a definite line under one chapter in artistic history – one that we still admire nowadays, with the particular kind of nostalgia that superb disasters inspire in our modernity. Of Duccio’s six sons, three became painters, as were the brothers and brothers-in-law of Simone Martini. It is thought that Pietro Lorenzetti was childless, but we know for certain that his brother Ambrogio had neither disciples nor heirs. No member of his family survived – his testament bequeaths all his belongings to the Confraternity of the Virgin of the city’s hospital. This was the final curtain: Siena would never again be the glorious home of avant-garde painting. The avant-garde moved away – to Florence, of course, where the great epic of the Renaissance, as Vasari would label it for us, continued. The poet Mario Luzi imagines the journey of Simone Martini, who, as death was lurking, and wishing to see for one last time the Maestà with which he had honoured his homeland, left Avignon to return to Siena. Luzi describes the temptations of Florence: ‘She draws him into her skein, / but he is uncertain / whether to brave her labyrinth / or to keep on the bank, without crossing the bridge.’20 This temptation came from the great metropolis, where the adventure was continuing. Meanwhile, in Siena, over-faithful painters would wear away their talents repeating, in all the routine of their admiration, the glorious themes of their ingenious predecessors, even though by the start of the fourteenth century they had been overtaken by the audacities of Alberti. But how lovely they were still, those themes, so full of sweetness and consolation that it was worth trying to pretend that the line of descent had not been broken.