You have left the door behind you. Not the door that opened under the little north wall, and was reserved for the Nine, from the staircase that led directly to their apartments. You are not one of those people who, for two months at a time, are the reluctant guests of this palace, obliged to remain enclosed in the heady company of the allegories exhorting them to act well. You are there to see, just to see, the Nine sitting under their painted doubles, or to see those scenes that, according to Bernardino of Siena, stay in everyone’s memory. So you have followed the itinerary laid out by the anonymous author of the fourteenth-century Cronaca senese: ‘in the communal palace, at the top of the staircase, the first door on the left; and if you go there you can see it’.1 Now we know: the successive refurbishings of the palace have modified the itineraries and we can no longer trust the entrances taken by today’s visitors to understand the different ways people used to gain access.2 The door leading from the Hall of the Great Council with the Maestà was put there in the fifteenth century, probably at the same time as the two others, also framed by a matt grey stone that impinges on the white ribbon along which the writings are arranged. The original entrances are now walled up: they are simple openings outlined by the white ribbon and its red border. The first door is higher up; to the left of the north wall, it is the door of the rulers. The second, to the right of the wall, is the door of the ruled.
You have passed through the door and there you are straightaway, surrounded by paintings, facing the ‘bad’ side of things. What can you see? Next to nothing: it is all murky, indistinct, as if chewed up to produce a dull and dirty ochre. On closer inspection, it is the neutral hue that modern restorers use to isolate missing sections in the pictorial matter – the very colour of the absent painting. But look again: little by little your eyes grow accustomed to this turbid mixture and start to make out shapes, outlines, contrasts. In the distance rise metal-blue hills topped by ghostly fortresses, in a reddening sky. But what is that pallid troop plunging down on the left? Men in arms, some on horseback and others on foot: a pale mesnie or household visible only thanks to its milky outlines. This phantom army is approaching a broad, winding river that cuts through a sterile plain; just a few thin little trees stand out on it. This is a dead land. It no longer brings forth anything but these suffocating, empty, fearful wastes. Only death creates a landscape. Just look across the river: there is a village on fire. Soldiers are leaving it, heading over the bridge having committed their crime. And further on, there are yet more: a horseman with a long red cloak astride a black charger, two infantrymen with light, short jackets, armed with pikes and shields, all leaving the town through a tall crenelated gate.
Ruined houses, closed doors, deserted streets: a town at war. The only activity visible is one of destruction. We can make out various silhouettes in the upper part of a palace; part of the balcony has lost its balustrade and the debris lies scattered over the ground. The figures are wielding great pickaxes: they are demolishing the building. Further off, bare bricks, broken-down stretches of wall, smashed windows: not a ruin, but the process of ruin, the slow disintegration of things that follows on after their paralysed torpor. All the shops are closed, apart from the armourer’s. The armed troop is pouring through the streets, like a river overflowing its banks. The soldiers prowl round, menacing, looking for something to do. Here is a sbirro (officer of the law) with a strange black-and-white costume, laying his hand on a citizen who is turning round: probably he has him by the scruff of the neck, unless he has just slapped him. In any case, his other hand is resting on the pommel of his dagger, ready to unsheathe it. Other figures are writhing and twisting in the gymnastics of assault. Their tense, hunched bodies contrast alarmingly with the placid expression on their faces, which register no emotion, behind the barrier of a half-smile.
But there is one woman showing fear and crying aloud: two men have seized her, a soldier in a short tunic and an elegantly dressed man who looks imposing in his white merchant’s cloak. She is wearing a fine red dress and, on her head, a crown; she looks as if she is dressed for a wedding. Is she betrothed to the man lying at her feet? Behind her, Lorenzetti has painted two curious characters from whom historians have long preferred to avert their gaze. But look: they have gone up to one another and are fondling each other; the older one is pointing at the younger man’s genitalia. This scene of homosexual seduction is a reference to the condemnation of sodomy by the communal governments: at the time, this activity was being denounced all the more aggressively as the vice contra naturam (against nature) was associated with anxieties over depopulation.3 And this is what is being depicted here: the city at war is deserted and sterile. On the opposite wall, indeed, there is a lady who physically resembles the one who is being assaulted: she is blonde, wears a crown, is dressed in scarlet and rides triumphantly at the head of her wedding procession. For clearly, if we turn round to look at the opposite wall, we will see the dismaying contrast, in the town as in the contado: neither sowing nor reaping, neither a well-populated countryside nor cheerful activity: ‘I see neither traders nor dancers, but merely men killing other men; the houses are not being repaired but demolished and set on fire’, as we have already seen Bernardino of Siena exclaiming. For the bad city is defined solely by what it lacks. ‘[A]ll I see is people leaving the city,’ the preacher continues, and then adds: ‘And everything that is being done is done in a state of fear.’4
It is this fear whose face has been depicted by the painter. You have only to look up and there it is, level with the city gate, floating in its ragged black clothes, brandishing its long dark sword: Timor. Its hair in disarray, its complexion muddy, its features drawn, it is as skinny as a ghost and has the staring mask of death. We cannot fail to see a comparison here with the reaper in the Trionfo della Morte that Buonamico Buffalmacco painted at the same time (between 1336 and 1341) in the Camposanto of Pisa.5 We truly are in hell. But this is a political hell, for it casts the shadow of the justice of the afterlife onto this earth.6 This is the meaning of the warning to be read in the scroll of Timor. It expresses the fear of danger – ‘thus by this path / no one passes without fearing death’ – revealing in contrast how crucial the issue of territorial control was for communal regimes (and this was probably the case right from the earliest signs of the urban self-governing political movement in the twelfth century). Ensuring the security of circulation, extending the space in which transactions could be guaranteed beyond the city walls: this was the first effect of a good communal government. What is being played out here is nothing less than the very idea of the common good, and that is why Timor exhorts us, first and foremost, to respect civic values: ‘Because all seek their own good alone, here / justice is in thrall to tyranny.’ What should we fear if not ourselves, the way we have forgotten the principles of civil life on which is based the very possibility of a shared existence? What else can we fear but our own anger?
War – yes, quite likely, but not the war waged by an aggressor from the outside, coming along to overturn the established order: rather, the war of all against all, bringing savagery to the very heart of the city. As a historian, one might put it this way: the inextricable interweaving of the alliances and divisions that form the tangled skein of intrigues proper to communal Italy engenders such an intense level of conflict that, in this case, all wars are civil wars. But one could also say, taking refuge in a more Platonic terminology, that what we have here is not war but sedition, stasis rather than polemos. For the Greeks, stasis was the turmoil in the divided city state that produced disunity and civil war. It was a movement, but it was also, in philosophical language, the immobilization of the flux of existence, which was thus frozen. It brings ‘the bond of division’ into the heart of the city, and raises conflict in it as if erecting a stele.7 Nicole Loraux has shown how Greek taxonomy comprised a very precarious shelter for those who sought to take refuge in it from the wickedness of the world. Admittedly, Platonizing is often a kind of euphemistic activity – and euphemism is an essentially Greek word. In Aeschylus, the Erinyes of blood and vengeance that Athena has managed to keep at bay from the city become ‘the Kindly Ones’ and proclaim: ‘May the insatiable sedition (stasis) of evil never rumble within this city,’ but also: ‘May [the citizens] give each other grounds for joy in a thought of shared amity, and may they hate with a single mind.’8 In the depths of these Greek words, uttered in an attempt to appease and lower tensions, we can still hear the throb of tumult.
One of the most effective ways of euphemizing war is to look the other way and decide, quite simply, not to see it. The scenes I have in mind cover a third of the surface painted by Lorenzetti. But it is not going too far to claim that most of those who have analysed this work more or less ignore this. It is true that the poor preservation of the pictorial matter discourages aesthetic judgement – so much so that it seems no longer to be worthy of attention for the history of art. From this angle, the Google Art Project, which has started to collect high-definition images of the reassuring beauty of the world, has adopted the radical, high-resolution procedure of simply leaving out the ‘bad’ parts of the fresco, thereby producing the digital artefact of a one-sidedly optimistic vision of the government of men and women. The historians of the Sienese fresco do not simply wish away the ‘bad’ parts, but even they are more interested in political ideas than artistic forms; they condescend to considering the west wall only as the tarnished and misshapen reflection of the wall opposite, like the visions of hell on the typanums of cathedrals: according to Jean-Claude Bonne, the disorder depicted here is simply ‘the tragic inversion and/ or the grotesque mirror of the heavenly order’.9
This is probably one of the consequences of the kind of idealist reading prevalent in specialists of political doctrines, hypnotized by the little north wall of allegories distributing its effects on each side – again, rather like the Christ of gothic porticos, trenchantly dividing the saved from the damned. It always follows the same order: the main principles, then their beneficial effects, and then, in a hellish annex, their negative effects – which are nothing other than the reverse of the ‘good’ effects. In terms of political philosophy, however, a realistic vision of the operations of power forces us to start with the realization of its concrete effects: good government is defined less by the virtuous principles that inspire it than by the positive consequences to which it leads. As Machiavelli would put it, this is the verità effetuale della cosa (the practical truth of the affair): the truth of the political is uttered on the basis of its real, objective effects.10 So how did these cose d’Italia present themselves at the time Lorenzetti was painting? In terms, this time, of political history, we are forced to reply: they were more akin to the way the artist depicted them on the west wall. Indeed, we might describe the other wall – even though it is so often seen as a realist painting of the life that was led in a peaceful city in those far-away mediaeval days – as nothing but a mirror that, as it were, shows the realities portrayed opposite, only the right way up.
After all, war was the permanent horizon of the political life of Italian city states from the thirteenth to the fourteenth centuries. For the past twenty years, the historiography of life in the communes has sobered up and lost its irreducible idealistic optimism, a product of the genealogical fervour with which, for so long, it sought the origins of our public liberties in the mediaeval past. If we wished to draw just one lesson from this, it would be easy to state it in these terms: there is a continual re-evaluation of the culture of hatred in the way that societies are organized.11 As they were reconsidering the decisive role of the militia in urban elites and the crucial place of knightly culture in their value system, historians were also recognizing the key word in communal political systems. This word was odium. We need to remember that these societies, so imbued as they were with the practices of writing, were both profoundly judicial in nature and at the same time intensely violent. True, this was a regulated violence: aristocratic vengeance, for example, was one of the ordinary ways of settling conflicts. But it often took the less ritualistic form of unbridled violence. We need to understand, for example, the care with which Lorenzetti placed, in each of his scenes, horsemen and infantrymen side by side. This marked an essential distinction in the waging of war. Jean-Claude Maire Vigueur has shown that the cavalcata (or speditio) was a limited, regulated form of conflict, reserved to the militia. But this is not important here: rather, those who fight on horseback (the milites) and those who fight on foot (the pedites) – following a fundamental distinction in communal Italy, both for the way the military was organized and for political life – are here united. They form the communal militia, namely the set of the commune’s military forces (including both the city and the contado) that was known as the exercitus. ‘In addition, the more people it brings together, the more the communal exercitus seems to be a machine whose aim is to destroy and crush rather than to fight.’12 Its many troops lived off the land, destroyed the harvests, pillaged and burned. There was an Italian trecento word to express this, a word that expressed less the brutality of the event and more the banality of a common practice: guasto.
So that is exactly what Lorenzetti painted on this side, without exaggeration or undue insistence: guasto. An army pouring down and devastating the land, systematically indulging in arson, pillage and rape, and ruining (guastare) the territory. War seen face to face, not in the paroxysm of some sudden catastrophe, but as a regular, routine activity, almost a seasonal event. War as Siena waged or suffered it several times in the first third of the fourteenth century, especially to defend its land against its Tuscan rivals, especially in Maremma. A war of annihilation – on a reduced scale, no doubt, but a war of annihilation all the same. And there was another way of euphemizing it: by reducing it to something exceptional and localized in a battle that can be given a name. This is true with Giorgio Vasari: in the first edition of his Lives (1550), where he praises Lorenzetti for being the first in modern painting to have ‘counterfeited in the travailing of the figures the turmoil of the air and the fury of the rain and of the wind’13 (but was this not also true of the flames licking the village?), he also writes: ‘In a large hall of the Palazzo della Signoria in Siena he painted War, Peace and the events of the latter.’14 This is all he said. And yet he was on the right track: not good and bad government but, and in this order, ‘la Guerra, la Pace e gli accidenti di quelle’. Then, in the 1568 edition, Vasari had second thoughts and specified, wrongly, that he was referring to ‘la Guerra d’Asinalunga e la pace appresso’ (‘the War of Asinalunga, and after it the Peace and its events’). The Battle of Sinalunga, in the Val di Chiana, took place in 1363; it is commemorated in the Sala del Mappamondo in the communal palace by a fresco painted by Lippo Vanni in 1372, and Vasari was confusing this with Lorenzetti’s work. This was also probably because, as a historical painter, depicting great battles in the paunched bellies of princely palaces, Vasari could not imagine anyone painting war without seeking to shelter it behind the authority of a name. And the names of battles also had a fetish value.
He was not the only one to do so. There are many historians who have homed in on the contextual facts behind Lorenzetti’s allegory. Does the width of the river allude to the plains of the Po where Siena had so many enemies? Attempts have also been made to recognize different symbolic and architectural elements referring to Siena’s great political and territorial rival, Pisa, the Ghibelline city. In the 1330s, the struggle for control of the Maremma – in particular the strategic defensive site of Massa Maritima – led the two cities into a merciless war. Siena finally conquered Massa Maritima in 1335, but only after an exhausting and bloody campaign, a dirty war in which the Pisans made several incursions into the contado of Siena.15 The image of a territory ravaged by the guasto of an enemy exercitus did not serve merely to draw a contrast with the appealing panorama of a city at peace; far from it: it was probably meant to remind the Sienese of the painful ordeals of their recent past. Unless it was sending out an even more ambiguous message, as Rosa Maria Dessì has recently suggested.16 In 1338, another Ghibelline city, Grosseto, surrendered to Siena. The act of surrender, written in the vernacular, granted Siena imperium over Grosseto; it was signed on 17 March and read in public on 13 April in the palace – just as Lorenzetti was engaged on the painting of his fresco. Might he have been asked to add some allusion to the ravages of war that the arms of Siena had just inflicted on the contado of the recently subjected city? This may seem a somewhat surprising suggestion as it reverses the roles. But in any case it cannot diminish the meaning of an image which is not limited to the past by its contextual interpretation. The city at war is not just Pisa or Grosseto, any more than the happy city is Siena, even though it may resemble it. The memory of political events does not exhaust the sense of the work, and does not transmit any single unambiguous message. It acts as an echo, and adds to the rumble of nameless wars its own particular stridency, the vibration of time itself.
So there are not just several discourses at work here, but several interwoven narratives, each with its own temporality, sometimes as brief and sudden as the event, sometimes as broad and slow as memory. So we need to hear all of them, including the symbolic narrative presented by the quatrefoil medallions framing the composition, whose frieze forms the lower and upper borders of the three walls of the Sala della Pace. Some of these medallions have been worn away, or destroyed by the later doors pierced in the north and east walls, but they, too, have been completely neglected by interpreters of the work. And yet their function is to alert our gaze by suggesting a second interpretation of the scenes depicted, thereby reinforcing or highlighting them. This is the case with the pontifical insignia set over the happy city, while the medallions of the emperors Nero, Gaeta and Antiochis dominate the city at war; and the same applies to the way the seasons and the divinities are set out: winter is on the west wall and summer on the east, while Mars is on the west wall and Venus on the east. This emphasizes the symbolic contrast between the two walls.17 Does this mean they form what Jack Greenstein calls the ‘symbolic synopsis’ of a relation between Peace and War on the one side and the configuration of the planets and seasons on the other?18 By resorting to astral symbolism, Lorenzetti was indeed borrowing the common language of communal iconography, as used to such great effect by Giotto in his decoration of the wide vault of the Palazzo della Ragione in Padua between 1306 and 1312.19 Compared with the unfathomable complexity of this model, Lorenzetti’s use of astrology was very limited: the celestial signs can express the vicissitudes of history and maybe even announce them, but the fact remains that it is people – people in society – who make this history, insofar as they are political animals.
This is why it is ultimately to these people that the exhortation expressed in the painted writings is addressed. War, in truth a hideous matter, here displays its real face: the maw of tyranny. ‘Let lordship be taken over her [i.e. tyranny] / and let each man busy his spirit and his intelligence / with always subjecting everyone to justice, / to forestall such black damage / and strike down tyrants.’ We stand in front of the ‘bad’ part of Lorenzetti’s fresco as if confronting our fears – and rather than allowing ourselves to be overwhelmed by panic, the only way out is to find the right words to label them with. This is the meaning of the political iconology of Carlo Ginzburg: in Picasso’s painting Guernica he seeks the violent conjunction between the old and the contemporary, as in the celebrated frontispiece to Hobbes’s Leviathan, depicting the nightmare of that cold monster the State devouring individuals.20 Hobbes said of himself: ‘Fear and I were born twins.’ To translate Thucydides describing the anomia that followed the arrival of the plague in Athens in 429 BC – ‘no one was held back by fear of god or by human laws’ – the philosopher used the word ‘awe’, suggesting both ‘awful’ (inspiring fear) and ‘awesome’ (inspiring respect). This was his way of expressing the essentially political nature of fear – not the Timor Dei of politicians but the fear signified by the Latin word vereor, which could be translated as both ‘I fear’ and ‘I revere’. Terror or reverence? That is the point we have reached. That is why we need to advance further, approaching the tyrant and his court of vices, and even venturing into the monster’s maw, for here alone can be seen the yawning gap that constitutes the very gap of the political.