Essay

The city as a representation

The whole visible universe is but a store of images and signs to which the imagination gives a place and a relative value.

Baudelaire

The allegory of good government and its effects on the city

In the council chamber of the Palazzo Signioriei in Siena, there are 35 meters of frescoes painted in 1338-1339 by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, commissioned by the Comune. It is called "Allegory of good and bad government and their effects on the city and the countryside". The wall on the right shows how an administration governed by wisdom, justice, magnanimity and peace results in a flourishing city, bustling with activity and with contented people. The idyllic picture is complemented by the surrounding nature, which is well managed. In the patriarchal atmosphere of the medieval town, the buildings are familiarly connected to the streets and public squares, where craftsmen produce and merchants sell goods, pupils learn from benevolent teachers and builders erect buildings.

On the wall to the left, the greed, vanity, corruption, deceit and discord of the rulers, i.e. political immorality, lead the city to... you can't see what, because the fresco is damaged. But being a subjective vision, no one stops us from imagining. We can see there, for example, deserted streets, where only horses run at full gallop, whipped by nervously disheveled faces, howling from place to place, one at another. Dust, deafening horns, and danger have driven citizens from the now washed-out pavement, the vegetation is parched, the harmonious civic atmosphere is destroyed. The fields lie fallow. Builders demolish the beautiful houses and build high walls and wide roads for more speeding chariots and furious horsemen. The people, still unable to give up their activities and social life, have taken refuge in huge houses that are hard to capture in the picture. Inside them, they have clustered together in a sort of cave-cities, but even that doesn't fit into the picture, it would have to be a separate interior detail. But anyway, I think we've just gone back in time about 674 years.

Allegory allows us that. After artists of all times have indulged in it without authorization, theorists have also legitimized allegorical projection as a privileged means of communicating more complicated meanings to the public. Jean-François Lyotard, for example, said that, as énigme du visuel, an allegory, even a fanciful allegory, has the quality of inducing a precise interpretation in relation to the result of the direct interrogation of the foundation of visual, stereoscopic thought. As in our case, rather than an urban analysis with a variety of interpretations, a story with a coherent conclusion would be better. I don't know. Maybe both. The first method would be urbanism, with its rigors and errors, and the second would be criticism, of which Northrop Frye said: any architectural commentary is an allegorical interpretation and proves the affinity between allegory and criticism.

Lorenzetti's allegory is, after all, a critical commentary. Such allegories, with social and political meanings, are generally of two kinds: they are either projections of a desire, proposition, ideal or illusion, or a critical representation of a reality. Their authors in the past were either the powerful or scholars and artists. Ancient history has given us allegorical messages from kings about their unbridled power, or from the Church as the mouthpiece and executor of divine power, i.e. their own ideals in relation to the people. Paradoxically, although the occupation of philosophers is the understanding of complex reality, through their cerebral visions they have been equally remote from public sensibility. Only artists, when they have taken the pulse of civic life, have most often touched the aching nerve of the community.

Lorenzetti did not differentiate between the real and the ideal. He critically captured the quality of the urban environment through a political, social, moral, economic, aesthetic and urbanistic lens. His interpretation was partly inspired by the reality of his environment, partly imaginative and idealized. But he unified them into a single aesthetic act, just as the urban public space in his representation integratively relates mass architecture with representative architecture and human energies.

But what, by the way, has the good government of Siena done to integrate urban synergies so successfully? Lorenzetti seems to be telling us that the ideal of good governance was the same as his own, and above all the same as that of the whole community. That is what I believe it was. And I also believe that that moment at the height of the Middle Ages was the first and the last in which this was so. Like in medieval fairy tales.

How much of the collective mind is found in dreams of happiness in allegories and how much of those dreams were realized is a recurring theme in history and art history. I'll try a brief look back, then a look around and, finally, in my own backyard. The aim is to come closer to an answer to the question: how can a democratic government today reconcile pragmatic capitalists with the idealistic cultural elite and an obtuse public, but from which it draws its money and still expects the vote?

By, of course, finding solutions to the most justified desires. And above all by identifying them as such among the financial interests (however ignoble), among the high and far-sighted aspirations of the elite (however unrealistic), among the derisory desires of the masses (however mediocre) and, of course, among their own ambitions (however disdained). And above all, empathizing with each of them and satisfying them all in some way, but with just measure(temperatio, in Lorenzetti's fresco). And by fighting not to let itself be ruled by legal, accounting, technical, demagogic political-journalistic or group-interest petty messes. I know that in practice they are not small and that they have their own partial justice, but that is precisely why they must be placed in a hierarchy, at the top of which the long-term interests of the city must be at the center. I know this is easy to say.