Books: The Good of All - by Mariella Carlotti

An art history book that looks a lot like a civics book: after all, what is art history for if not to educate, as well as to excite and move minds? We could summarize in this way the interesting book The Good of All, written by Mariella Carlotti and published by Società Editrice Fiorentina. It is a book entirely dedicated to a single work of art: the frescoes of Good Government and Misrule by Ambrogio Lorenzetti that decorate the Sala dei Nove inside Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico.

Mariella Carlotti, The Good of All

Mariella Carlotti offers us a nimble, no-frills book of just over one hundred pages, with beautiful illustrations in color</strong, and above all devoid of the rhetoric that is the main risk for those about to write a text on a work of dense political significance. A work that cannot be understood unless one immerses oneself in fourteenth-century Siena. We are, in particular, between 1338 and 1339. Siena is experiencing a fruitful artistic and cultural season: the Lorenzetti brothers are at the height of their careers, Simone Martini has recently left the city to move to Avignon, and alongside the greatest there is a whole host of minor artists, but capable of making Siena the main artistic center, along with Florence, of Italy at the time. Above all, Siena is a city that enjoys political stability and a period of lasting prosperity, which began in 1287, with the establishment of the Government of the Nine, a junta of nine citizens, drawn from the local bourgeoisie, who were able to kick-start what is regarded as the Golden Age of Siena’s history: a period of almost seventy years, from 1287 until 1355. It was under the Government of the Nine that the Palazzo Pubblico and the celebrated Piazza del Campo were built, but above all, it was with the Government of the Nine that the city was provided with a system of laws that, a novelty for the time, was translated into the vernacular (the language of administration was in fact Latin) and made available to all citizens who wished to read it. Moreover, those who governed Siena had to commit themselves to doing so with justice and fairness. With great modernity and civic-mindedness far ahead of its time, the 1309 Constituto required the rulers of Siena to hold in supreme consideration the beauty of the city, for the cause of delight and cheerfulness to strangers, and for the honor, prosperity, and increase of the city and its citizens. In short, beauty is seen as something that must have a public purpose, must teach.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s frescoes well fulfill the task of demonstrating, perhaps too schematically for the eyes of us contemporaries, but nonetheless effectively, what is the beauty that makes a city grow prosperously, and what, on the other hand, are the dangers and horrors of a city that has fallen into the hands of misrule: and that of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (and of the Government of the Nine that commissioned him to paint the frescoes) is a warning that is still valid today. Mariella Carlotti, after taking us through the history of Siena from its origins to the fourteenth century, and after dwelling for a whole chapter on the magistracy of the Nine, first tells us about the Sienese school, then introduces us to the figure of the great Ambrogio Lorenzetti, and finally tells us about his frescoes, not forgetting a few mentions of the palace that contains them.

The Good Government of Ambrogio Lorenzetti