This review of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Good and Bad Government Reconsidered by Jules Lubbock appears in the June 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
From 1292 to 1355, the prosperous city of Siena was governed by an elected council known as the Nine. Appointed for two months at a time, this group of men lived in the Palazzo Pubblico. They ate together, slept together, ruled together – and, in 1338, commissioned from leading painter Ambrogio Lorenzetti a series of three extraordinary murals to adorn the Sala della Pace (Room of Peace), where they oversaw the business of state.
In this room, on facing walls, Ambrogio painted two sweeping panoramas that illustrate the Good Commune and the Tyrannical Commune, presenting alternative fates for Siena and its territories. The first is a peaceful, bustling scene of everyday life, full of gorgeously observed detail – a woman watering her flowers, a pig driven to market, shoemakers, dancers, builders – while its dystopian opposite is a scene of violence, cruelty and neglect, with its crumbling buildings, uncultivated fields and communities ravaged by flames. Between these two stark visions, on the wall behind the door through which the Nine would have entered, an Allegory of Good Government presents Justice enthroned. Two intertwining cords from her scales pass through the hands of 24 citizens to the sceptre of a monumental figure representing the Sienese Commune, who sits on a bench surrounded by the personified virtues.
Continuation of the wall of Good Government wall (facciata) of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena. Photo: Antonio Quattrone
These three paintings, known today as the Allegory of Good and Bad Government, were in their time unique as political works of art on such a large scale. They remain one of the most extraordinary enigmas in the history of art and their purpose, function and contemporary reception remain elusive. In this new study, Jules Lubbock presents his thesis for their making and meaning, the considered results of a career of close looking, discussion, intrigue and delight, grounded in careful attention to textual and visual sources.
In the past, Ambrogio’s frescoes have often been interpreted as a painted treatise on government. Attempts have been made to translate Ambrogio’s images into words, to reconstruct a lost brief that might illuminate the Nine’s political theories. Even those who focus on the images for their own sake have inevitably interpreted them within a political framework, and seen these images as by turns a celebration of the Nine’s success and a warning of what might happen without their wise rule. Here, Lubbock attempts to foreground the paintings, confining his account of Siena’s governance to an appendix and instead beginning with a discussion of the paintings’ unusual design.
For Lubbock, the lack of central focal point in Ambrogio’s asymmetrical compositions underpins a message that is deliberately more cautionary and ‘less smug and jingoistic than at first sight’. Here, he contends, Ambrogio argues for the precarity of government, whose ability to govern justly relies not only on Wisdom, Peace and Fortitude, but also, crucially, the willing and continued participation of its citizens. A new translation and analysis of the 14-stanza poem inscribed on the frescoes themselves, known as the Canzone, concludes that Ambrogio was commissioned to create a scheme that would glorify justice and illustrate the specific stages by which justice operates to better a state, but that it was Ambrogio himself who chose which parts of the text to emphasise in his images, akin to the setting of words to music: ‘some words are intended to be heard distinctly, others are lost in the polyphony.’
Detail from the Tyrannical Commune in The Allegory of Good and Bad Government (1338) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Publico, Siena. Photo: Antonio Quattrone
Lubbock teases out a thought-provoking and original interpretation of Ambrogio’s work, arguing that the painter deliberately questions the ‘boom-town optimism’ of 1330s Siena. Instead, Ambrogio presents an image of a government that rules by force and survives through consent, and an image of a state that remains peaceful only under surveillance and threat. In the countryside, a beggar sits by the side of the road, ignored by a mounted huntress. Riders disappear down backstreets – innocent or up to no good? Even the dancers who enact harmony are joined through fragile connection: they do not hold each other by the hand but by the joint of the little finger.
In the past, interpretations of Ambrogio’s masterwork have inevitably reflected the political ideals of their time, with the Nine often heralded as a proto-democracy or republic. In the mid 20th century, scholars found parallels between the Nine and the emergence of their own liberal democracies. Lubbock, however, sees this government as ‘a collective tyranny’, self-selected from a small group of the richest citizens. Here, the Nine is recast as a ‘collective dictatorship of “billionaire” bankers and international merchants’ – an interpretation that is entirely justified but reflects our own troubled times as much as a post-war scholar’s view reflected theirs.
It is to be hoped that this book is made available in the Palazzo Pubblico and that a future edition might update its already beautiful illustrations with new photography, when the restoration of Ambrogio’s paintings currently underway in the Sala della Pace is complete. This proposal for Ambrogio’s paintings as images of an uncertain, precarious world, where stability is maintained through both consensus and the not-so-hidden threat of violence, is fit for our own time.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Good and Bad Government Reconsidered by Jules Lubbock is published by Ad Ilissum.
From the June 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.