Patrick J. Geary
For much of the twentieth century, as France transformed from a predominantly agricultural to an industrial society, the centre of gravity in French mediaeval history was the countryside. From Marc Bloch’s French Rural History (1931) through Georges Duby’s classic study of the Mâconnais (1953), to Pierre Toubert’s monumental study of mediaeval Latium (1973), French scholars and the French reading public were obsessed with the deep structures and rhythms that defined a rural society disappearing before their eyes.1 Patrick Boucheron, successor at the Collège de France of his mentor Toubert and Toubert’s mentor Duby, is a historian of the city: He was formed in and around Paris, first at the venerable Lycée Henri IV, subsequently at the École normale supérieure Fontenay-Saint-Cloud (since transferred to Lyon), where he studied and later returned to teach, then at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, at which he taught before his election to Collège, where since 2016 he has held the chair of ‘the history of powers in western Europe, thirteenth to sixteenth centuries’.
His love of Paris and his faith in its complex urban fabric, its people and its culture, are clear in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France delivered shortly after the Bataclan theatre massacre in November 2015, where, quoting his great predecessor Jules Michelet, he affirmed that ‘Paris represents the world’.2 As a scholar, however, the cities to which he has devoted most of his life’s work are those of northern Italy: Milan, first of all, the subject of his 1998 The Power to Build: Urbanism and the Politics of Municipal Administration in Milan in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,3 but more generally the urban spaces of late mediaeval Italy and their intellectual, political and artistic fecundity. Boucheron is a keen observer of the physical presence of the city: the importance of the built environment in the lives of city dwellers. However, as he emphasized in his inaugural lecture, ‘these urban forms are nothing without the social energy that animates them, that enacts and transforms them’.4
Not surprisingly, then, he has been drawn, as have generations of Italian, German, British and American scholars of the Italian communes, to the campo of Sienna, to its Palazzo Pubblico, and within, to its Sala della Pace, on whose walls, in 1338, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted the stunning triptych now known as ‘the Fresco of Good Government’, but which, as Boucheron points out, is not a fresco and, for centuries, was identified not with good government but rather with the contrasting images of war and peace.
In this rhetorically crafted and carefully constructed book, Boucheron both draws on and spars with the vast literature already dedicated to interpreting Lorenzetti’s work, principally that of Rosa Maria Dessì and Quentin Skinner, in an attempt to approach these paintings with fresh eyes. Or, better, to reflect on the impossibility of approaching them, since, as he writes, today we cannot see them as they were meant to be seen, but only as vestiges. Not only is the image of war on the western wall badly damaged, not only are the images on the eastern and northern walls distorted by retouching and overpainting through the centuries, but the substantial changes in the building itself make it impossible to move through space to encounter them as one did in the fourteenth century. Thus, the role that Boucheron undertakes, that of the historian, is to guide the reader into an inaccessible and impossibly distant world, but one whose challenges and fears remain disturbingly actual in the twenty-first century.
For Boucheron, the fundamental misunderstanding of these powerful paintings is precisely to see in them an allegory of good and bad government, a visual representation of political ideology derived from Aristotle and filtered through his commentators across the centuries. Rather, Boucheron seeks to ground the paintings in the precise context of Siena in the third decade of the fourteenth century. The Sala della Pace was the chamber in which Siena’s principal governing body, the Nine, met in deliberation. When the Nine commissioned Lorenzetti to depict ‘war and peace’, their concerns were not with a generalized theory of government but with the very concrete fear of civil strife and its ability to destroy the social fabric that bound together Siena’s often fractious society. But even more, they feared the apparent alternative to civil strife: the overthrow of communal government by unitary lordship, the rise of the signoria, as was happening across northern Italy. The original title of Boucheron’s book captures this exactly: Conjurer la peur – to ward off fear. The image of peace, which covers the eastern wall, shows peace not simply as the absence of war, but rather as the concrete effects of social justice: harmony, a harmony that can bind together all citizens. The western wall shows the results of war, but war in the mediaeval sense of guerra, that is, in the first instance, feud, factional conflict, which threatened, even more than external war, to destroy all that is good in the city. In between, on the north wall, separating war and peace, are the figures of the government of the city, the importance of peace, strength and prudence, magnanimity, temperance and justice, exercised by the commanding figure of the commune of Siena itself, the collective guarantor of peace and the defence against factionalism and, ultimately, the tyranny of one-man rule.
An English-reading public that has followed the development of Quentin Skinner’s reflections on these paintings as well as those familiar with the work of Chiara Frugoni, Denis Romano and Rosa Maria Dessì, among many others, will recognize that Boucheron’s detailed analysis of the paintings owes a great deal to the careful scholarship of his predecessors. The originality and significance of this book lies less in the novelty of its insights into the specific elements of the three wall paintings than in how he constructs his over-arching argument about the original context of the project and its possible meanings today.
Patrick Boucheron has a knack for making distant history resonate with contemporary issues and anxieties. Many of his projects, such as his collaborative World History of France,5 are overtly political, aiming to undermine national chauvinist discourses. The Power of Images, too, is a political book. In an age when nations and regions in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, threatened by the pressures of social, cultural and economic change, are once more looking not to mutual collaboration but to autocratic leaders as saviors, Boucheron asks us to stand in the Sala della Pace and contemplate the alternatives: harmony and tyranny, peace and war.