Siena Icon of the Common Good: Lorenzetti and Lonergan

Abstract

Inside the Palazzo Pubblico, the dignified Town Hall of Siena, is Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s cycle of frescoes of the Allegories and the Effects of Good and Bad Government painted between 1337 and 1339. The frescoes were commissioned by the Council of the Nine, a régime which retained power in Siena until 1355, after having preserved its peace and prosperity for some sixty years. A wise old man symbolizes the Common Good while a patchwork of neat fields, tame boar and busy hoers suggests order and prosperity. Bad Government is a desolate place, razed to the ground by a diabolical tyrant, the Sienese wolf at his feet. Lorenzetti’s civic masterpiece, Siena’s icon of the Common Good, documents the Catholic social tradition which recent papal teachings reaffirm in their critique of both Marxism and laissez-faire capitalism. Lorenzetti’s frescoes are not only decorative and celebratory, but they are also didactic; for this was the primary object of all medieval painting. The frescoes, a distillation of Augustinian and Thomist thought, are designed for the eyes of Siena’s ruling 61ite, for few, outside of that charmed group, ever penetrated to the innermost rooms of the Palazzo Pubblico. It is clearly the Nine who are addressed by the words which appear above the head of Justice in the fresco: “Love Justice, you who rule the earth.” The frescoes state the obligations of the governor to the governed, rather than the obligations of the governed to the governing.