Allegory of Good Government

An argument in three walls of one room, not a story, Lorenzetti creates good rule and bad rule as two opposing results from the same starting point, allowing a council of nine magistrates to literally sit amongst the ramifications of their own decisions during their meetings. The only natural light in the room falls on a wall, with a figure representing the Common Good enthroned over a group of Virtues, and next to it a fanged and horned tyrant enthroned over a cowering Justice on the other half of the wall, representing the alternative. What follows along the adjacent walls is not allegory anymore, but consequence made visible: a panoramic and densely populated Siena, and the surrounding countryside, fertile, cultivated, where a falconer rides out, while an old beggar sits, unnoticed, by the roadside. On the other side, facing it, the results of an evil government: ruins where buildings once stood, desolation where fields were cultivated, and terror where the peaceful trade of another wall had flourished. It is the cycle's very modernity which is startling, even the quiet city has been described by recent scholarship as not being found to be harmoniously at peace, but rather a city that remains orderly only when it is quietly policed by the implicit threat of the dancer's presence, the touch of one dancer to another, the presence of the other, a touch of the other. The fresco was, remarkably, one of the first major fresco cycles dedicated to purely secular-political, rather than religious-didactic themes, commissioned specifically for the chamber in which Siena's actual governing body met and deliberated - so that the fresco, as it were, was not meant to be viewed from the sidelines but to be lived in, deliberated under, and measured against, session by session.