The Allegory of Good and Bad Government

Taken wall against wall, the programme is compelled. Each effect requires its cause, and the cause would be an emblem without the effect: the north wall alone is a treatise, the east wall alone a view of a prosperous town, and together they argue that this city is what this government produces; the west wall runs the same argument backwards. Within the allegory the parts are tight, the cord from Justice’s scales through Concord to the citizens and up to the Commune drawn as one line. What yields is density. Several of the virtues about the Commune and the vices about Tyranny could go without loss, Magnanimity beside Temperance and the doubled armed figures below among them, and the verse cartouches restate what the image already shows.

Score: 8.5 / 10

What the cycle brings into the open is a political condition stated in images, and it holds outside Siena: the ordinary life of a people, a builder on a wall, a girl at school, a man taking goods to market, a field ploughed to the horizon, is the visible effect of justice and concord in its government, and their absence is visible too, as an empty road and a burned house. Security is the condition of labour and fear the condition of tyranny, and the two scrolls say so. The citizens are the bond of the state: the twenty-four hold the cord, at the scale of persons. Held below the top because the disclosure is the commune’s own theory of itself, painted for its rulers, and its meanings are spelled out by inscription and allegory more than found.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Elevation is real and mostly of one kind, a grave and spacious delight. Its heights: the countryside opening from the gate, hill beyond hill, roads, fields and farms under an even light, a distance no Italian wall had held before; the city as a crowd of towers and loggias stacked to the edge of the wall; Peace reclining in white on her cushion of armour. Dread is reached on the west wall, in Tyranny’s horned and squinting face, but the damage has taken much of it, and the effects of war are now a ruin of a ruin. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is temperature, kept deliberately even as befits an argument for order: wonder rather than transport, a north wall solemn more than elevating, and a height that recurs across two walls but stays below grandeur.

Score: 8.0 / 10

Myth built, and load-bearing. The structure of the whole is the just city and the unjust city, the oldest political image there is, Hesiod’s two cities and the city of God set against the earthly city, here not alluded to but laid out as the architecture of the room, with the governors seated between the two walls. The Commune is the ruler as father and as the city itself, the twins and the she-wolf at his feet giving Siena its Roman origin; Tyranny is the horned devil-king, a goat at his feet; Justice bound beneath him is the order fallen. The particular stays particular: the cathedral’s dome and campanile, the gate, the contado, the city’s colours. Held below the higher marks because much of the deep is carried by personification, a figure labelled with a name, which evokes more often than it builds.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The inheritance is the religious fresco cycle of Giotto and of Duccio’s followers, the virtues and vices in the margins of sacred programmes, and civic painting of a narrower kind: heraldry, the defamatory images of traitors, the Maestà Simone Martini painted in the next room. The departure is large: a monumental cycle whose subject is a secular theory of government; the first sustained painted view of a contemporary city as it lives; the first panoramic landscape in European painting since antiquity, the subject of a wall and not its backdrop; the work of ordinary citizens made worthy of a government’s walls. The stake was public: the regime’s own chamber, its image read every day by those it addressed. Held a step below the top because the allegorical apparatus is inherited, not invented.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Substitute another form and much goes, because the work knows what it knows as the walls of the room where the Nine sat. The governors were placed between the two possible cities, their choices on either side of them. Fresco binds the image to the building: the city is painted inside the city’s own palace, and the view of the country runs the length of a wall as the road runs out of the gate. Allegory on the short wall and observation on the long wall is the form of the argument itself, cause in figures and effect in the world. On a panel or in a book the cycle would be a treatise with pictures. Held below the top because the north wall depends on its labels and comes close to a diagram.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Evidence over promise: nearly seven centuries, and a modern scholarship that has made the room one of the most argued images in the history of art and of political thought. The open questions are questions of meaning. Is the enthroned elder the Commune or the Common Good? Is the programme Aristotelian and Thomist, as Nicolai Rubinstein argued in 1958, or pre-humanist and Ciceronian, as Quentin Skinner argued from 1986? Are the dancers women or youths? What does Security’s gallows mean for the peace she guarantees? Is the landscape a map of the contado, a season or a claim of territory? The walls yield detail on every return, from the shops to the hawking party on the road. Held at the line, not above it, because some of the yield lies in the documents behind the programme rather than in the walls.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The field is Italian painting of the fourteenth century. The intrinsic force is very high: the cycle reorganised what a wall could be about, opening painting to secular political argument, to the life of the contemporary street and to landscape as a subject in itself. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: civic allegory followed in Italian town halls; the landscape and the city view had few successors on this scale within the century, the plague of 1348 and the change in Sienese painting after it cutting the line short; the panoramic landscape returns only in the fifteenth century and in the north, where the calendar pages of the Très Riches Heures (8.6) are a neighbour, how far an heir being argued; and late, the cycle has become the image by which political theory pictures the republic. Delayed and indirect reach is credited and discounted.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, at nearly seven centuries. Form: the north and east walls are legible whole, with the repainting and losses usual in fresco of this age; the west wall is badly damaged, much of the effects of bad government lost or illegible and the vices about Tyranny only partly readable. That wall carries half the argument by symmetry, and its loss is charged in proportion, though the argument stays legible from what survives. Presence: continuous and of the rarest kind, in the room for which it was made, in a building still the seat of the city’s government, preached on in 1425 and in view since. Fabric: damp, earlier restorations, repainting. The whole good walls set the figure in the upper half of its band; the ruined wall keeps it from the top.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Command of fresco across three walls, judged to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing on the east wall: a city of dozens of buildings in a coherent if not single perspective, roofs and loggias stacked and turned so the town reads as one body; figures at work drawn with exact observation, the builders on the scaffold, the woman with a basket on her head, the mule loaded with wool; the landscape modelled hill by hill under one light, with roads that recede. Peace is a figure of drapery and repose as fine as any of its century. The costs are charged: scale shifts between figures and buildings, the city’s space is assembled more than constructed, the allegorical figures are graded in size by rank and drawn with less life than the citizens, and repainting obscures some of the hand.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the hieratic Commune in his arc of virtues on the north wall, and a peasant driving a pig toward the gate on the east. One law holds them: cause and effect, government and its fruit, in a single territory that runs from the throne to the horizon, and the west wall obeys the same law reversed. The range is very wide, allegory to observation, palace to field, virtue to vice. But the mode changes at the corner of the room, from personification ranked by size and labelled to a world painted as seen, and the joint shows: the two modes agree in argument, not in kind of image. Security, flying over the fields with her scroll and gallows, carries allegory into the world, and she holds. The seam keeps the axis below the higher marks.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Many orders are held, and one argument integrates them. The state: the commune, its council, its justice, its soldiers and its prisoners. Labour in great variety: building, trade, cloth, teaching, ploughing, sowing, threshing, carrying goods to market. The family and the social order: the young dancing, a procession that may be a wedding, a household on the road. Education, in a teacher with his pupils. The natural order: the countryside, and the planets and seasons in the borders. The sacred: Faith, Hope and Charity above the Commune, the vices as the devil’s court. History: Rome’s twins at the Commune’s feet, and war. Consciousness is the weakest order, held in the citizens’ grave attention more than in any inner life, and the integration is by argument across a room, not in one image. Few paintings hold as much in one structure.

Score: 9.1 / 10