The Republican Regime of the "Room of Peace" in Siena, 1338-40

Abstract

IN THE DIVINE COMEDY a woman traditionally identified as Pia de' Tolomei declares, mi fe',-Siena made me (Purgatorio 5.134). The city, preempting nature and family, calls character into being and establishes her identity. But this Siena capable of making citizens was also made up of their individual differences and riven by social and political conflict. How could ideal of civic unity be legitimated and reconciled with fact of insistently particular identities and interests? This was a crucial question for all city-republics of medieval Italy, but Sienese response was played out in a series of artifacts that contend with high tensions of a republican culture. In this essay I want to show how these tensions come to light, if not to rest, in fresco cycle painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Room of Peace, Sala dei Nove or meeting hall of Nine, chief citizens' council of Sienese republic between 1287 and 1355 (figs. 1-4). The Nine Governors and Defenders of Commune and People of Siena were selected two months from class of citizens who qualified as the middling sort according to statute but who belonged for most part to upper middle ranks of bankers, longdistance traders, and manufacturers in a population of around fifty thousand. Although they were entitled by their oath of office to use every possible means for the conservation, augmentation, and magnificence of present regime, these citizen-officials usually exercised their authority within a system of interlocking councils that depended on participation of hundreds of citizens and reflected divisive topography of hilltown and a fractious society of rival families, neighborhoods, factions, and economic interests.' In commissioning Lorenzetti to paint their meeting room in town hall-the few surviving records of payments point to period between 1338 and 1340-the Nine were acting on an established policy that had already transformed Siena into a showplace of public art centered on great piazza of Campo. Since thirteenth century Sienese artists had been called upon to paint political icons of Virgin; they had lined major council room adjacent to chambers of Nine with paintings of Sienese conquests, decorated chests for official papers and covers of books of public records, and portrayed civic officials in illuminated manuscripts.