If you haven't already read them, you might want to read Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3
“When you go to Siena, make sure you visit the Palazzo Publico,” David Mayernik had said to me in Rome. “And make sure you see Lorenzetti’s frescos, his amazing allegory of Good and Bad Government, completed in 1138.”
As Michelle and our two girls took a break, lounging in the warm afternoon of El Campo (the central plaza), my boys and I paid our entrance fee and climbed the long flight of stairs to the first floor (Piano Nobile) of the Palazzo Pubblico. We passed through several rooms until we reached the back of the palazzo and entered the Sala del Consiglio (Council’s Room). As my sons, Jordan and Jonathan (at the time, ages 11 and 9), and I sat down to rest on an extended bench, we faced the large fresco, Madonna of Majesty, at the front of the room.
Having done a lot of research before we arrived, I explained to my boys that this was where the city government met and that this room, which might hold up to 350 people, functioned as a mini forum for the building, a venue where they debated potential laws. As we looked at the painting, we noticed that the painting dominated the room, acting as the backdrop for the Podesta’s chair. Then I saw the inscription under the fresco, a reminder aimed right at the rulers who would debate new laws in this room. In the inscription, one that I read out loud, Mary, the Mother of Jesus, says:
My Beloved bear in mind
When your devotees make honest petitions
I will make them content as you desire,
The angelic flowers, the rose and the lily
With which the heavenly field is adorned
Do not delight me more than good counsel
“Why do you think they placed the painting (with its inscription) in this room?” I asked my boys. They weren’t sure, not realizing that I had put on my teacher’s hat. So I gave them some more hints, trying to get my point.
Next, I pointed to the small enclosed chapel. “Why do you think the chapel sits right next to where the lawmakers gathered? Why build it there? Could it be sending a not so subtle message?” If rulers were going to make wise laws, they needed to remember the divine lawgiver?
They still were not focused on what I was trying to teach them. I was trying to be patient; my boys looked travel weary. Jordan’s eyes were red from his allergies. I once heard the key to making any story come alive for kids is to be enthusiastic. So maybe I needed to try harder.
I asked them to follow me into the next room, a much smaller meeting room called the Sala Dei Nove, or the Room of the Nine. In this room, the famous fresco cycle of Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, was painted on three walls. As we entered, we noticed the Bad Government section of the fresco, an image of a devilish ruler.
In Timeless Cities, David Maynernik asks why the city of Siena first presents the visitor or the lawmaker with the effects of Bad Government when they enter the room. It was on purpose, he thinks. Since Mary “admonishes in her fresco as much as she protects… the visitor—and the politicians—are pinned between a promise and a warning.” The promise is simple: if they make just laws, good things will result; but if they make unjust laws, bad things will result.
We turned around to face the Good Government fresco. Above the head of the excellent ruler are floating three theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity. The ruler is flanked by six classic virtues, three on each side—Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity, Temperance, and Justice. My boys noticed that justice carried a sword. We shuffled over to the other end of the fresco, depicting the two scales of justice.
“Do you see what connects the scales of justice and the ruler on the other side of the painting?” I asked. We spent some time analyzing the fresco, noticing how the rope attached to the scales of justice passes down to a woman named Concordia, who holds it with one hand. On the other hand, she appears to have a musical instrument. She passes the rope to a group of people, representing citizens, who connect the rope to the bottom of the Good Ruler’s scepter—demonstrating that part of the ruler’s authority comes from citizens who have gotten it from Concordia. Lorenzetti’s lesson is clear: when the Good Ruler governs with justice, guided by wisdom and the other virtues, the result is harmony, concord among the people.
We turned to the last of the three frescos: The Effect of Good Government. “What do you see?” I asked. “Well, no one is getting robbed or beaten or killed,” Jonathan said. In fact, in the fresco, Lorenzetti depicts communal harmony: people holding hands, students listening to a lecture, a store selling goods, people manufacturing goods, and shepherds tending to their flocks. The lesson was not lost on my boys.
Undoubtedly it was not lost on the rulers of Siena for hundreds of years. “As a work of art,” Mayernik writes, “the fresco is almost inexhaustible in its possible levels of appreciation. It is both a promise to the citizens and an admonishment to their leaders as a moral message. As an architectural ideal, it both sums up and spurs on an urban vision that would receive additional fleshing out during the next three centuries.”
The Sienese put up the frescos to help lawmakers do the right thing. But I wonder if they realized that as citizens saw the civic virtue of their representatives in action, it would inspire them to virtue. This shaping function is what Alberti taught a hundred years after Lorenzetti painted his frescos. For Alberti, places like the Palazzo Pubblico, in all their beauty and grandeur, were necessary because the activities within the structure would be a school-room for the whole city, teaching virtue. “In the city, one learns to be a citizen, acquires buone arti, sees many exempla to teach him to flee vices,” said Alberti.
City design should facilitate that order by providing places for conspicuous participation in the activities that make order in the city. City design also would serve as a didactic or rhetorical means to move men to understand virtuous actions. “The city is considered, says Westfall, to be a collection of buildings and open spaces consciously designed and related to one another, a collection that allows citizens to bring order to their society through their participation in its affairs.” Alberti was the first thinker to say the city design was as important as the constitution and laws. He saw the city as a unique combination of physical and political forms, and he believed that the activity of individuals produced and maintained the city's order.
It was late afternoon. Having completed our tour of the Palazzo, we joined Michelle and my two daughters outside the Palazzo Publico, sitting in the middle of Piazza del Campo, the main square of Siena. As Mayernik writes, the square “perfectly embodies [a] theatrical air, almost recalling in form a Roman theater, and is entered through passages that in most cases are not unlike a Roman amphitheater’s vomitoria.” In the Sixteenth Century, Montaigne was so enchanted with the square that he called it” the most beautiful that is to be seen in any city.” (Timeless Cities, 175) But “the order and the beauty of the city fabric, along with the fertility and beauty of the landscape that surrounded it” did not happen by accident, adds Mayernik.
As I reclined on Il Campo, I read again Mayernik’s concluding words on Siena:
“Plainly, if we want our cities to actually say something meaningful that we all can endorse, we can’t cross our fingers and hope for the best. We must design cities that speak. And as we have seen, their forms can speak eloquently, like an accomplished orator, both in plan (walls, streets, squares) and in the skyline profile. But the job of the orator…was as much concerned with what to say as with how to say it; what our cities have to say is all of our responsibility to decide, or else it will be decided banally by default.” (Timeless Cities, 194)
But if we will have cities that speak to us and architecture that shapes us, we must discover how to shape cities first. To learn this, we needed to go to the tiny hilltop town of Piensa.