The Power of Images

Siena, 1338

Patrick Boucheron

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781509512904, 9781509512898
• eBook ISBN: 9781509512935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

Where can the danger be lurking? Two soldiers are huddled together, one gazing up at the sky, the other darting a sideward glance. They derive a tacit reassurance from their weapons, but they are both in their different ways alone and scared. They were painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, and they seem symptomatic of a state of emergency: the year was 1338, and the spectre of the signoria, of rule by one man, was abroad in the city, undermining the very idea of the common good. In this book, distinguished historian Patrick Boucheron uncovers the rich social and political dimensions of the iconic 'Fresco of Good Government'. He guides the reader through Lorenzetti's divided city, where peaceful prosperity and leisure sit alongside the ever-present threats of violence, war and despotism. Lorenzetti's painting reminds us crucially that good government is not founded on the wisdom of principled or virtuous rulers. Rather, good government lies in the visible and tangible effects it has on the lives of its citizens. By subjecting it to scrutiny, we may, at least for a while, be able to hold at bay the dark seductions of tyranny. From fourteenth-century Siena to the present, The Power of Images shows the latent dangers to democracy when our perceptions of the common good are distorted and undermined. It will appeal to students and scholars in art history, politics and the humanities, as well as to anyone interested in the nature of power.

1
‘I thought of these images, painted for you’

‘When I was away from Siena preaching on War and Peace, I thought of these images, painted for you; they were definitely a very fine invention.’ It is 1425 and Bernardino of Siena is speaking. He is addressing a huge crowd; they cluster round like iron filings attracted by the preacher’s feverish words. They have all flowed into the famous square, the campo of Siena. Romantic travellers (and the tourists of today, intoxicated by the thrill of the horse racing at the Palio) see it as erotic in its allure; they imagine it as a shell raising its scalloped edges to the city, which tenderly enfolds it. But this was not how it was viewed in the time of Bernardino. It was a basin, like the basin of a fountain, where people met to experience what it means to share a space, a portion of the city, and they moved around with gestures simple and clear as the limpid water which rises there. It was a basin that could contain a space like the orchestra of a Greek theatre: a fully controlled public space like that in Siena always mimes the monumentalized void of those theatres where the arguments on which the city was founded could be voiced.

And it was indeed a theatre – not just because the façade of the Palazzo Pubblico enclosing the square of the campo curves like a stage curtain swelling in the wind, leaving room for the invasive shadow of the Torre del Mangia to cast its shadow full length across it. It was a theatre, for those public sermons were great spectacles laid on by those mercenaries of the inspired word, worth their weight in gold, for whom the communes competed so fiercely.¹ Bernardino was one of those preachers, travelling from town to town, exhorting, threatening, correcting, scolding the people whose emotions they stirred, temporarily welding the hubbub of the public space into a chorus that sang in unison expressing a single desire.

Born in 1380 into the noble Sienese family of the Albizzeschi, Bernardino entered the Franciscan order in 1402. Here he learned the art of talking to ordinary people, drawing on all the tricks of a direct, physical, emotional rhetoric, disdaining neither facile effects nor theatrical gestures. Firstly in Umbria and Tuscany, and then in Lombardy and the region of Venice, his voice was heard, thunderous with menace, rousing the crowds. In Rome in particular, Bernardino caused disquiet: did he not risk neglecting the Trinity and the company of the saints by concentrating his teaching on the figure of Christ alone? In 1427, then again in 1431, Bernardino was placed under investigation. He was forced to retire to a monastery; he died in 1444 and was canonized six years later.

It was one year before his death that Sano di Pietro, the Sienese painter, depicted him standing in front of a large, orderly crowd, divided into two sections by a piece of cloth held across the square separating the two sexes. Such was the effect of his words: they enveloped, and they separated. From his pulpit, when he brandishes the IHS tablet bearing the name of Jesus with which the façade of the Palazzo Pubblico is also stamped, the preacher turns the entire city into a sounding board for the Church. There he stands, Bernardino, the shepherd of his flock, facing the campo. He speaks to arouse images in the minds of his audience. And frequently, as we are in Siena, he refers to the city’s great painters – Duccio, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers, all those who, in the years before the Black Death, turned the Tuscan city into the capital of political art or, more precisely, the capital of the politicization of art. This is not because art flatteringly extolled or symbolized the virtues of power: it is because the way that it categorized things in civic terms meant that the creation of pictures was seen by all as an essentially political business. Thus Bernardino put those images into words and uttered the names of the famous artists, the pride of the city, who had painted them.² Not to interpret these images, but so that his speech could draw on the impression they had left (as he hoped) in the memories of his listeners. In all his listeners, or more precisely in each individual listener, he awoke a memory, just as we sometimes walk in the footsteps of some ancient trace; and in this way he reawoke the aura of the work of art: ‘I thought of these images, painted for you.’

Two years later, on 15 August 1427, in a sermon on marital happiness and the hierarchy of the angels, Bernardino alluded to the Madonna attributed to Simone Martini and reworked in 1415 by Benedetto di Bindo. In September of that year, giving a sermon on the disciplined behaviour that young girls should adopt before marriage, he referred to another painting familiar to his Sienese audience: the Annunciation painted in 1333 by Simone Martini and his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi for the San Ansano altar in the Cathedral of Siena. We see him illustrating the reserve we must show if we are to protect ourselves from the temptations of the flesh, pointing dramatically to his right, indicating the grille on the window of the apartments of the Podestà. Later, on 25 September 1427, in a sermon that violently condemned sodomy, claiming that this vice was more widespread in Italy than elsewhere, Bernardino referred to the situation of Italy on the map of the world or mappemonde that Ambrogio Lorenzetti had painted in the hall of the Palazzo Pubblico. It still bears the same name today, the Sala del Mappamondo, and art historians ponder what that cosmogonic painting that made the immensity of the world so tangible must have looked like – but it can no longer be seen.

The people facing Bernardino, too, could not see the images that he projected in front of them in his words, penetrating through the façade of the Palazzo to which his back was turned. But they had seen those images, perhaps, or had heard about them; in any case they could imagine them. At least that is what the preacher supposed when he addressed his listeners in these words:

This Peace is such a sweet thing that it brings sweetness to one’s lips! And look at the word War, opposite! It is something so harsh, and brings such terrible savagery, that it makes the mouth bitter. Look! You have painted it up there, in your palace. Oh, painted Peace, what a joy it is to see it! Just as it is so sad to see War on the other side.³

This time it is Lorenzetti’s fresco which Bernardino is discussing. He says ‘in your palace’ – this is the meaning of the expression palazzo communale. Following the Peace of Constance (1182), which conceded to them the political rights the emperor had failed to keep for himself, the cities of communal Italy had adopted, for their own use, the grave and solemn name of palatium, in which we can hear the subtext of sovereignty. The bishop laid claim to this sovereignty, but it was now the comune which wielded it; and comune was first and foremost an adjective referring to nothing other than the sharing of power. That is why it is essential to the very idea of the communal palazzo that one could have free access to it – or, more precisely, that it was claimed that everyone could have access to it freely. So with the paintings inside, it was as if they could be seen from the square. Bernardino played on this fiction of transparency (which is perhaps one of the essential fictions of the political realm); he is standing outside and saying: ‘Look!’ But what is there to see? Images that refer you to two words that confront each other: peace and war. The first (pace) can be uttered with a gentle expression; when you say the second word (guerra), your face twists in a grimace.

Thus, the important thing about Bernardino’s sermon in 1427 is the way the preacher is asking his audience to ‘look at’ a public painting they cannot see, but that they may remember, precisely because it is public. So he is not really evoking images so much as the imprint they had left in a memory that we may imagine was collective. And this imprint is first and foremost verbal, that is, corporal: painting makes words visible, and it is these words that Bernardino requests his audience to look at directly, and what there is to see is nothing other than the physical effect that one feels, personally, when uttering these words. The mouth twists and grimaces if it has to say the word ‘war’ (guerra); it is mild and gentle when ‘peace’ (pace) brushes against its lips. And this is what I wish to focus on here: the emotion of desire or suffering in speaking bodies.

But something else is happening. To make his audience remember what we call the ‘Fresco of Good Government’, Bernardino talked about happiness and sadness, peace and war – and not about government. Unless, of course, we take this word in the sense it had in those days, as the pastoral conception of power over people, an idea that was common in the Christian Middle Ages. Regimen was the art of guiding the behaviour of other people while governing one’s own passions; ruling rightly and conducting oneself rightly were one and the same thing, one and the same impulse, for the priest and for the king, who both had the task of leading their flocks to salvation.⁴

Two years after originally mobilizing this series of civic images in his campaign to lead the faithful along the right path of an ethics that was inseparably political and domestic, in 1425, Bernardino of Siena was already preaching on the campo. The thirtieth sermon in the Lent cycle developed the theme of Psalm 133: Ecce quam bonum et quam jocundum habitare fratres in unum (‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’). It was clearly a good day to talk about civic concord, and in this case, Bernardino presented his audience with Venice as a role model. He did so by first announcing his divisio: ‘Firstly, concord. Secondly, the love of one’s neighbour. Thirdly, the love between husband and wife.’ And as he developed his first point, he described at length Lorenzetti’s fresco:

When I was away from Siena preaching on War and Peace, I thought of these images, painted for you; they were definitely a very fine invention. When I turn to Peace, I see merchants coming and going. I see people dancing, repairing houses, working in the vineyards and on the land, sowing their seed, while others on horseback are heading out to bathe. I see girls going to a wedding, great flocks of sheep and many other things. And I also see a man who has been hanged so that holy justice will be maintained. And because of all this, everyone lives in holy peace and concord. Conversely, if I turn my gaze to look at the other side, I see neither traders nor dancers, but merely men killing other men; the houses are not being repaired but demolished and set on fire, the fields are no longer being worked; the vines are cut down, nobody is sowing the seed, nobody is going to bathe, and nobody can indulge in any pleasure – all I see is people leaving the city. Ah, women! Ah, men! The men are killed, the women raped, there is no flock other than the flock being dragged away as booty, men are killing each other, justice has been laid low, the scales in the balance have been broken, people are tied up in chains. And everything that is being done is done in a state of fear.⁵

Bernardino is not here describing an image, but the memory you retain of an image as you move away from it. Above all, it is really a vision that im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Foreword by Patrick J. Geary
• Acknowledgements
• Plate
• Prologue: The site of an ancient urgency
• 1 ‘I thought of these images, painted for you’
• 2 Nachleben: the watchful shadows
• 3 The Nine
• 4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti, famosissimo e singularissimo maestro
• 5 On each side: allegory, realism, resemblances
• 6 Esto visibile parlare: the walls speak to us
• 7 Guernica in the lands of Siena
• 8 The seductions of tyranny (what the image conceals)
• 9 Concord with its cords
• 10 With the common good as lord
• 11 What Peace sees: narratives of spaces and talking bodies
• 12 Well, now you can dance
• Epilogue: Vanishing point
• Appendices
• Published sources
• Bibliography
• Picture credits
• Index