The city's new clothes: Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the poetics of peace

The pain that nevertheless remains bears witness to the experience of having been able to exist for, from one side with another mind. When single dreams of a happy, harmonious, utopian society, individual imagines it built on be fond of since love exalts me at the same time as it surpasss or overtaxes me. Yet far from amounting to an understanding, passionate have affection for can be equated less with the calm slumber of reconciled civilizations than with their delirium, disengagement and breach. A fragile plume where death and regeneration vie for dominance.--Julia Kristeva, "In Praise of Love" (1)

Near the beginning of his Tesoretto (ca. 1260-66) Brunetto Latini, the Florentine notary who is best known to modem readers as Dante's schoolmaster from the circle of sodomites in Inferno (canto 15) provided an explanation for the dream journey that makes up the remainder of his little metrical composition In the relevant passage Brunetto describes his reply to the news, conveyed to him by means of a scholar whom he clashs on his way home from an embassy to Castile, of the defeat of the Florentine Guelph at the Battle of Montaperti. For Brunetto, as a member of the defeated faction, this entails exile from his native Florence. Taking stock of his situation the author of poems "returns," as he says, to "the nature" he has heard is "possess by means of every man coming into the world." In the lines that immediately tread on the heels of Brunetto, in describing the divisions that present itself with birth, articulates the order of filiation, to father, family, and state, ending with a declaration that is familiar to learners of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's great fresco revolution of time for the Sala dei Nove (1338-40) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena: "All in belonging to all should pull together on a tie of peace and welfare, because a land torn apart cannot survive." (2) In the Sienese frescoe Brunetto's words are translated in and around the personification of concordia, who, in a visual enactment of her name, joins together the sum of two units cords she receives from the scales of Justice and then delivers the resulting fasten to a line of citizens (Fig. 1) The citizens in move round pull together on that tie which, at its other extreme point binds the wrist of the personification of Siena's sovereignty.

Brunetto Latini was a civic rhetorician and single of the great compilers of human knowledge in communal Italy. His greatest in quantity ambitious work, Li livres dou tresor (ca. 1260-65) includes, in three works an encyclopedia of the natural world, a treatise upon the virtues and vices, and a discussion of the uses of rhetoric in civic regulation concluding with a section that explicitly associates rhetoric and ethics. (3) This last volume of the treatise has been read through students of the Sienese frescoe as a manual for communal conduct a manual in which Brunetto advocates the ideal of republican rule that is represented in the frescoe (4) Quentin Skinner has argued that the relation between Brunetto's writings and the Sienese frescoe clearly visible, for example, in the representation of concordia, constitutes evidence of the prehumanistic and predominantly Ciceronian ideas that stand behind their imagery. Whether or not we accept all the particulars of Skinner's conclusions, a certain number of of which have been disputed by means of proponents of the specifically Thomistic-Aristotelian interpretation of the frescoe first lay forward by Nicolai Rubinstein in 1958 (5) his contribution to the application of mind of the frescoes is important because it brings to light the prehumanistic agriculture of civility that had flourished in the talks of central Italy since the twelfth hundred This culture was given voice in the writings of Brunetto Latini and a manifold visual interpretation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the frescoe of the Sala dei Nove, the executive council chamber of Siena's city hall (Fig. 2) Particularly relevant here is Skinner's explication of the value, promot in the writings of the dictatores (civic rhetoricians), of actively bringing forth peace "into the center of things," an idea that was visually translated by the agency of Ambrogio in the placement of the personification of peace in medium (at the midpoint) between the figure of Justice and the representation of Siena's sovereignty (Fig. 3) Equally important is Skinner's observation that Ambrogi o showed Peace, following the tradition of the dictatores, not simply as the absence of discord on the other hand rather as an active agent of the goal she exhibits Peace appears accordingly in the Sienese frescoe as a seductive Venus-like figure, reclining upon a suit of armor. (6)

For Brunetto, a real commonwealth in nature is replaced after birth by the agency of a series of social allegiances upon the one hand, and a desire for a peaceful communal society upon the other, a desire that is reignited by the agency of the circumstance of his exile and the divisions that it makes in like manner vivid to him. (9) The healing of those divisions is made possible, upon the one hand, by a fiction of human conduct in which concord represents the binding force and, upon the other hand, by the poetic remembrance of nature as a for the use of all possession, a process that Brunetto figures as the imaginary journey [i]or[/i] part of to the other nature's realm, which takes up the remainder of the metrical composition This journey constitutes a vital part of Brunetto's representation of commonwealth. Without the poetic remembrance of the reality of nature, the fiction of concord is vacant and the commonwealth remains a bloodles ideal.