Lessons from a 14th Century Masterpiece for a Post-Pandemic World
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s painting known as “The Allegory of Good Government and Bad Government,” from 1339, is thought to be Europe’s first landscape painting since the fall of Rome, 900 years earlier. Located in the Palazzo Pubblico, or town hall, of the Tuscan city of Siena, about an hour by car from Florence, it is a series of three frescoes originally commissioned by a rotating group of plutocrats known as the Nine.
Today it has that unusual distinction historic artworks sometimes have, a combination of hype and distance that makes the work hard to see on anything like its own terms. And since I last saw “The Allegory” in the ample meeting room known as the Sala dei Nove exactly a year ago, much has changed.
Against the backdrop of an exhausting year, one of the last great works of art made before the Black Death has become something much more poignant: a meditation on history, hope, and the passing of time.
Even equipped with all our scientific knowledge, a pandemic is a kind of visitation, a disruption of the normal order of things. It reminds us of life’s fragility, upends the status quo, and demands that art respond in new ways. The question for artists, historians, and patrons is how.
“For the past 30 years, art hasn’t dealt well with death,” says the artist and filmmaker Francesco Vezzoli. “It hasn’t captured the sense of loss, or powerlessness, or melancholy. We’re experiencing a wave of disease. Next we’ll deal with the emotional wave. That is an opportunity for art to be useful.”
Despite the seven centuries between them, Lorenzetti and Vezzoli are connected by a shared belief in the prophetic powers of the artist to help mankind reckon with the present and imagine the future. Of course, that requires that close attention be paid. "The Allegory" was once intended as a user's manual for a proposed new world, as Tuscany moved on from an age of tumult, but many missed the prophecies hidden between its sweeping panels.
The Nine were the Patriotic Millionaires of their day, bankers and merchants who paid for big public works like Siena’s magnificent city hall and dramatic public square (their largesse was a way of justifying their power in the city). Life was flourishing because of the trade of spices and silks with the Mongol empire, so Lorenzetti painted a landscape instead of the celestial backgrounds of heaven that had dominated Western art until then. Paradise, he seemed to be saying, was right here on earth.
The three sprawling frescoes in the Nine’s Sala della Pace are marked by symbols of justice and good governance presiding over a city brimming with commerce.
Then, in the panel known as “The Effects of Bad Government,” an omen for posterity. A fanged, porcine tyrant death-stares at the viewer, surrounded by collapsing buildings, ruined crops, broken bridges, and a city devoid of street life, as if in a plague. Lorenzetti wasn’t predicting the future but rendering in vivid colors the frailty of prosperity, and the consequences of corruption.
“They were in a big boom, and trying to show people what would happen if people behaved selfishly, and there was division in society,” says Rocky Ruggiero, an art historian who lectured in Florence until the pandemic forced him to return home to Rhode Island. “There was a perfect storm of positive developments, and artists like Giotto and Lorenzetti, writers like Dante and Petrarch, were showing that this world, and mankind, could be great.”
Then history turned. A crop failure crippled Siena as the bubonic plague made its way from Asia, reaching Genoa via trading ships in 1347. By 1350 the disease was as far north as Norway, and soon as much as half of Europe had died. Lorenzetti was among the victims, along with many of the scholars, merchants, and theologians vital to the making of his complex masterpiece. The Nine were deposed in 1355. The population of Siena didn’t reach its pre-1347 level until sometime in the 20th century.
It is possible now to see the painting through many eyes: the triumph of the moment, as the Nine declared the rightness of their rule. The terror and uncertainty of the poet and early humanist Petrarch, a survivor of the plague, looking back at what so recently had been. And in decades after that, the hardening into an impossibly distant past, as people troubled by life’s violent uncertainty sought answers in classical texts and ideas, fusing them with their own sensibilities to create what became the Renaissance.
“There was a lot more turmoil, with people redefining things about themselves, the church, and power,” Ruggiero says. “It changed the painting in one sense, but even more we see how resonant these themes of justice and division can be. What we bring is what we bring to Covid: whether we’ll fight selfishly and in division, or with justice and a new respect for ourselves in nature.”
Italy has come a long way since I visited Siena last February, when the Piazza del Campo was still crowded and the country was beginning to grapple with a lockdown. Shortly thereafter, as many Italians took to their balconies to sing arias of despair and joy, Vezzoli came up with a quiz for the Fondazione Prada’s Instagram stories that surveyed users about famous or imagined couples throughout history—say, Wallis Simpson and the Prince of Wales or Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. It was a lark, but there we were, connecting virtually around the globe even during our moment of real life disconnect. Like most Instagram stories, the game was meant to be online for just 24 hours, but it has been preserved as a highlight, which means it will remain accessible as long as the account is active. (Plans are in the works for a sequel this year, and the Fondazione released a publication about the project in February.)
Devastation in Italy and elsewhere was followed by recovery and then a second wave, and as the year drew to a close and the promise of a vaccine miraculously came to fruition, I thought of Petrarch, that oft-quoted contemporary of Lorenzetti’s.
He was by turns a witness, a mourner, and a journeyman, spending the 20 years he lived after the plague looking for ways to persevere. His words resonated with me from beyond the grave: “Oh happy posterity who will not experience such abysmal woe and will look upon our testimony as a fable.”
Great art is a record of its time and, sometimes, if it survives, a vessel for the human spirit through the ages, encoded in aesthetic bliss. Beauty, the philosopher Elaine Scarry has written, compels us to reproduce that bliss, and to be better and more just. Even more so, we see today, when in maturity there is also a sense of loss.
Much remains to be processed about the shocks of 2020. And in that work lies the daunting thrill of allowing ourselves not only to be enchanted by beautiful things again but to be challenged by them, in the best ways. The Tuscan region is back in lockdown at the time of this writing, so the Palazzo Pubblico has not yet reopened; neither has the Hall of the Nine.
Until they do, a 700-year-old holy grail waits patiently to offer wisdom and solace to all and any who seek it.
This story appears in the March 2021 issue of Town & Country.
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