The trip in the fresco

By analyzing a fresco of the hall of Peace of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena, Patrick Boucheron takes his reader in the fourteenth century Italy. Siena, prosperous city, is then governed by its merchants. A junta of nine people running the city, for a period as long as that of our Third Republic (1287 -1355). The period is stirred opposing Guelph and Ghibellines. We must convince people of the benefits of peace. The junta is benevolent and didactic. Not The Eleven imagined by Michon, conscious only of their glory, for the nine do not appear in the uplifting mural commissioned from Ambrogio Lorenzetti and his workshop. The room of the communal palace is decorated during the year 1338 on three walls with subject: The Effects of Good and Bad Government, illustrated by example.

Political advertising was invented long before the calls for cephalic oil Cesar Birotteau. On one wall, peace, prosperity of the city where the artisans busy themselves, the wealth of the country, where rising yields. On the wall opposite the war, ruin and desolation, fields ravaged, destroyed homes. All under the patronage guardian of the theological virtues (Faith, Hope and Charity), cardinal (Strength, Prudence, Temperance and Justice), and other allegories: Peace, Force, but also the evil that imprisons Tyrannia Justice at his feet , Avaritia with bat wings, Superbia, with drawn sword, Vanagloria, Vanity mirror and Misery, with his escort Abuse, Popper and Famine.

Patrick Boucheron is a fascinating guide. He revived the mural through the sermons of Bernardino Siena in 1427. It offers Lorenzetti to its rightful place: "By becoming a theorist of his art, the painter reaches the dignity of the intellectual" (p. 70). His speech must be weighed at the trebuchet, avoiding anachronistic approximation, where tempting. All interpretations of the table are sieved his erudition.

In this apology on the degeneration of schemes is concerned less fear of the tyranny of the noble seduction (p.231). Reading the table is also a history of political ideas in Italy during the Trecento, where parade Marsilio of Padua, Aristotle, Cicero, Saint Thomas, Petrarch, Dante, Machiavelli.

Machiavelli, precisely, that good laws are not born of a virtuous government, but the opposition between the moods of the great and those of the poor, "for never States do ordain harmless" (p.60) .

"Siena was the capital of political art, or more precisely the politicization of art" observes Patrick Boucheron (p. 26). But March 25, 1359, is the fall of the government nine. Their archives are burned and fresco narrowly escapes. In the summer of 1348, the Black Death befalls Siena, killing more than moist of the inhabitants, including Ambroggio Lorenzetti and painters of his school.

Rest painting that we can not look without the Boucheron book nearby. "A picture is transformed by the long history looks that have stepped on it" (p.49).