Foreword

Patrick J. Geary

For much of the twentieth century, as France transformed from a predominantly agricultural to an industrial society, the centre of gravity in French mediaeval history was the countryside. From Marc Bloch’s French Rural History (1931) through Georges Duby’s classic study of the Mâconnais (1953), to Pierre Toubert’s monumental study of mediaeval Latium (1973), French scholars and the French reading public were obsessed with the deep structures and rhythms that defined a rural society disappearing before their eyes.¹ Patrick Boucheron, successor at the Collège de France of his mentor Toubert and Toubert’s mentor Duby, is a historian of the city: He was formed in and around Paris, first at the venerable Lycée Henri IV, subsequently at the École normale supérieure Fontenay-Saint-Cloud (since transferred to Lyon), where he studied and later returned to teach, then at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, at which he taught before his election to Collège, where since 2016 he has held the chair of ‘the history of powers in western Europe, thirteenth to sixteenth centuries’.

His love of Paris and his faith in its complex urban fabric, its people and its culture, are clear in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France delivered shortly after the Bataclan theatre massacre in November 2015, where, quoting his great predecessor Jules Michelet, he affirmed that ‘Paris represents the world’.² As a scholar, however, the cities to which he has devoted most of his life’s work are those of northern Italy: Milan, first of all, the subject of his 1998 The Power to Build: Urbanism and the Politics of Municipal Administration in Milan in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries,³ but more generally the urban spaces of late mediaeval Italy and their intellectual, political and artistic fecundity. Boucheron is a keen observer of the physical presence of the city: the importance of the built environment in the lives of city dwellers. However, as he emphasized in his inaugural lecture, ‘these urban forms are nothing without the social energy that animates them, that enacts and transforms them’.⁴

Not surprisingly, then, he has been drawn, as have generations of Italian, German, British and American scholars of the Italian communes, to the campo of Sienna, to its Palazzo Pubblico, and within, to its Sala della Pace, on whose walls, in 1338, Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted the stunning triptych now known as ‘the Fresco of Good Government’, but which, as Boucheron points out, is not a fresco and, for centuries, was identified not with good government but rather with the contrasting images of war and peace.

In this rhetorically crafted and carefully constructed book, Boucheron both draws on and spars with the vast literature already dedicated to interpreting Lorenzetti’s work, principally that of Rosa Maria Dessì and Quentin Skinner, in an attempt to approach these paintings with fresh eyes. Or, better, to reflect on the impossibility of approaching them, since, as he writes, today we cannot see them as they were meant to be seen, but only as vestiges. Not only is the image of war on the western wall badly damaged, not only are the images on the eastern and northern walls distorted by retouching and overpainting through the centuries, but the substantial changes in the building itself make it impossible to move through space to encounter them as one did in the fourteenth century. Thus, the role that Boucheron undertakes, that of the historian, is to guide the reader into an inaccessible and impossibly distant world, but one whose challenges and fears remain disturbingly actual in the twenty-first century.

For Boucheron, the fundamental misunderstanding of these powerful paintings is precisely to see in them an allegory of good and bad government, a visual representation of political ideology derived from Aristotle and filtered through his commentators across the centuries. Rather, Boucheron seeks to ground the paintings in the precise context of Siena in the third decade of the fourteenth century. The Sala della Pace was the chamber in which Siena’s principal governing body, the Nine, met in deliberation. When the Nine commissioned Lorenzetti to depict ‘war and peace’, their concerns were not with a generalized theory of government but with the very concrete fear of civil strife and its ability to destroy the social fabric that bound together Siena’s often fractious society. But even more, they feared the apparent alternative to civil strife: the overthrow of communal government by unitary lordship, the rise of the signoria, as was happening across northern Italy. The original title of Boucheron’s book captures this exactly: Conjurer la peur – to ward off fear. The image of peace, which covers the eastern wall, shows peace not simply as the absence of war, but rather as the concrete effects of social justice: harmony, a harmony that can bind together all citizens. The western wall shows the results of war, but war in the mediaeval sense of guerra, that is, in the first instance, feud, factional conflict, which threatened, even more than external war, to destroy all that is good in the city. In between, on the north wall, separating war and peace, are the figures of the government of the city, the importance of peace, strength and prudence, magnanimity, temperance and justice, exercised by the commanding figure of the commune of Siena itself, the collective guarantor of peace and the defence against factionalism and, ultimately, the tyranny of one-man rule.

An English-reading public that has followed the development of Quentin Skinner’s reflections on these paintings as well as those familiar with the work of Chiara Frugoni, Denis Romano and Rosa Maria Dessì, among many others, will recognize that Boucheron’s detailed analysis of the paintings owes a great deal to the careful scholarship of his predecessors. The originality and significance of this book lies less in the novelty of its insights into the specific elements of the three wall paintings than in how he constructs his over-arching argument about the original context of the project and its possible meanings today.

Patrick Boucheron has a knack for making distant history resonate with contemporary issues and anxieties. Many of his projects, such as his collaborative World History of France,⁵ are overtly political, aiming to undermine national chauvinist discourses. The Power of Images, too, is a political book. In an age when nations and regions in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas, threatened by the pressures of social, cultural and economic change, are once more looking not to mutual collaboration but to autocratic leaders as saviors, Boucheron asks us to stand in the Sala della Pace and contemplate the alternatives: harmony and tyranny, peace and war.

Notes

Prologue
The site of an ancient urgency

You may not know its name, but you’ve already seen it. It’s known as the ‘Fresco of Good Government’. People haven’t always called it this; and in any case, it’s not really a fresco. Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted it in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena in 1338, ten years before his life was suddenly cut short by the Black Death, as were the lives of perhaps half the population of a city that did not know it was already declining – though it had in fact already declined, irremediably. You’ve already seen this painting, as it has been displayed in detail for over a hundred and fifty years – like a piece of meat on a butcher’s slab – as an illustration of all that is most flattering about our modernity. Here is Justice, there is Equity, and further on, Concord: feminine allegories with fine, high-sounding names. And here, too, in strident contrast with these, is the hideous maw of tyranny: the ugly grimace of a divided society, the soldiers raping women … You’ve seen all this so many times: on the covers of books, for example, whenever unimaginative iconographers have to find some visible depiction of a rather vague abstraction, for a textbook on constitutional law, for example, or a treatise on ethics. But Lorenzetti’s image also works very well for a book on agrarian history, city planning or urban sociology in the Middle Ages. His work swarms with a thousand singular details which for many people open an unexpected window on late mediaeval life.

So if you survey all the details of his work, you might feel a disagreeable sensation of déjà vu – the consequence of the omnipresence of advertising images. Are these images the icons of modernity? But if we say this, we are still falling prey to the tyranny of an impoverished language, for what we usually call an ‘icon’ in the modern sense is the complete opposite of religious imagery, marking as it does the loss of its aura. So it would be better to follow the great thinker of cinematographic imagery Serge Daney, and speak in terms of the visual. The visual replaces the image that you do not wish to see – and if you do not wish to see it, this is because it has become too similar to the world, a world that we can longer see in the form of a painting. The visual gives us something to look at, but it shows us nothing, because nothing escapes it: there is nothing outside its field; it provides no real experience, no otherness. To seek the image behind the visual is to try to allow this image to do its own work. It is an image in spite of everything, even if we try to force it to fade away. We need to allow it to make the most of its anachronistic qualities; we need to let it come to us (to each one of us) because it has come from very far away to gaze on us.

So do we need to embrace it in a single glance, abandoning any reassuring selection of mere details and instead surveying it as a whole? Perhaps we do need to accept its invitation to embark on what we sense will be a disquieting journey, as we will need to look on one side and then on the other, adjust our point of view, allow our gaze to roam over white walls where everything arrests and beguiles us, and where, too, the lines of a song painted in clearly legible letters cause us to linger: ‘Turn your eyes to gaze, / you who rule, on the woman who is depicted here.’

But historians generally impose a method of descriptive neutrality on themselves: they describe before they interpret. This is a laudable effort, no doubt, but it is doomed to failure. To describe an image consists in putting it into words, and since these words have a history and a life of their own, since they think with and against us but most often behind our backs and without us, this apparently transparent operation is in fact an instrusive and a restrictive categorization that limits our reading. So no sooner has the first word been pronounced than it is already too late: you immediately hear the first cogs of the interpretive machine grinding away as it labours to reduce the meaning of images to texts already read, or texts we have just discovered for this occasion, when instead we ought to leave these images to come to us alone, in their own way and in their own time. But after all, we have to begin somewhere. So let’s begin.

The paintings spread across three sides, the fourth (the south wall) being pierced by a window which comprises the sole source of light in the room.¹ This light first strikes the north wall with its parade of what we now call the allegories of good government. On the left sits a woman enthroned, holding a pair of scales with other characters gesturing around her; on the right, six women surround a great bearded old man sitting in state. These figures are all perched on a platform which places them on an intermediate level between the heaven of ideas (inspired by three theological virtues) and the ground of political action (where several different groups can be made out). This small wall comes between two lateral and completely different visions. On the east wall, twice as long, the effects of good government are displayed. The wall of the enclosure cuts the scene into two equal parts: first the happy city, where people work, dance and trade freely, then its countryside (the contado), where the land spreads out, arranged in harmony with the ordering of the city, as befits it. Opposite, on the west, the wall is not bipartite but tripartite, and on it we see, in a closer formation, the figures of bad government forming a court of vices presented as the monstrous double of the characters on the north wall. The effects of bad government on the city at war and on the dead land of the contado shape a landscape that is the complete opposite of that which adorns the east wall.

Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco presents, with calm determination, nothing less than a political programme as it spreads over three of the four walls of the Sala della Pace (Hall of Peace) where the Nine (i.e. the nine magistrates who governed the commune) used to gather. It is a programme of breathtaking boldness, since it proclaims what is or ought to be the slogan of any republic: if this government is good, it is neither because it is inspired by some divine light, nor because it is embodied by men of quality; it is not even because it can draw on a more solid legitimacy or more eloquent justifications than other governments; it is simply because it produces beneficial effects on each person, benefits that are concrete and tangible, here and now – effects that everyone can see and everyone can benefit from, benefits that are, as it were, immanent to the order of the city.

Such is the nature of this capacious and extended narrative, this frieze now known as the ‘Fresco of Good Government’. But herein lies precisely the problem: by flattening it out this way, like a Trajan’s column whose ribbon we fictitiously unroll as it spirals upwards to the heavens, books (and this book too, inevitably, just like all the other books the fresco has inspired) fail to convey the physical effect it produces. For though this painting has unleashed a flood of words and a continuous torrent of bibliography, before becoming a commonplace topic for art historians or an obligatory stopping-off point for political historians, it is first and foremost a place – quite simply a place. Siena, Palazzo Pubblico, Sala della Pace: here it is. The work is intangible, inseparable from the place where it was born, like the tanned skin of some ancient building, a kind of great cadaver. To feel surrounded by colours and framed by signs: Daniel Arasse has described the suffocating beauty of these places of painting. When you first go to see the fresco, it is never in fact for the first time: you’ve seen so many reproductions of it. That is why, with art, we never get to our meetings on time: we always arrive too late. What is so striking when we do arrive is the paradoxical smallness of the site: just seven metres long for the north wall, and twice as long for the others. It is an imposing work: the figures are placed well above eye level, yet they seem well within our reach – and each of them remains modest in size. It’s like going back to a childhood home which has grown bigger in our memories. You look around and you say to yourself: ‘But it’s so small!’

This is the image I’m going to be talking about: not so much to trace its history, or decipher it patiently like one of those rebuses on which the iconographical approach is so keen, but to understand the power with which it is actualized. And to seek to grasp that stupefying persuasive force that lays hold of you and latches onto you, ‘definitely’, as the preacher Bernardino of Siena would say in the fifteenth century, overflowing the intense context of its realization to fly straight towards the present day. There are many reasons that make it so profoundly modern: here I’ll mention just one. The walls of the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena are darkened by a threat weighing over the whole communal regime. The citizens of Siena are proud of their republic, but this republic is in danger. It is haunted by the ghost of the signoria which the painter depicts (to frighten himself, or to reassure himself?) as a horned monster emerging from the bowels of hell – or, rather, returning from a past that everyone had thought was over and done with. These days, it is surely obvious that democracy has been undermined and that there is no point – except as a way of calming our fears – in describing this menace as a return of murderous ideologies. But what label can we give to this surreptitious subversion of the public spirit which gnaws away at our certainties? When we cannot think how to respond, we are completely disarmed: the danger looms straight ahead. And Lorenzetti paints this, too: our paralysis in the face of an unnameable enemy, an indescribable peril, an adversary whose countenance we recognize but whose name we cannot utter.

1
‘I thought of these images, painted for you’

‘When I was away from Siena preaching on War and Peace, I thought of these images, painted for you; they were definitely a very fine invention.’ It is 1425 and Bernardino of Siena is speaking. He is addressing a huge crowd; they cluster round like iron filings attracted by the preacher’s feverish words. They have all flowed into the famous square, the campo of Siena. Romantic travellers (and the tourists of today, intoxicated by the thrill of the horse racing at the Palio) see it as erotic in its allure; they imagine it as a shell raising its scalloped edges to the city, which tenderly enfolds it. But this was not how it was viewed in the time of Bernardino. It was a basin, like the basin of a fountain, where people met to experience what it means to share a space, a portion of the city, and they moved around with gestures simple and clear as the limpid water which rises there. It was a basin that could contain a space like the orchestra of a Greek theatre: a fully controlled public space like that in Siena always mimes the monumentalized void of those theatres where the arguments on which the city was founded could be voiced.

And it was indeed a theatre – not just because the façade of the Palazzo Pubblico enclosing the square of the campo curves like a stage curtain swelling in the wind, leaving room for the invasive shadow of the Torre del Mangia to cast its shadow full length across it. It was a theatre, for those public sermons were great spectacles laid on by those mercenaries of the inspired word, worth their weight in gold, for whom the communes competed so fiercely.¹ Bernardino was one of those preachers, travelling from town to town, exhorting, threatening, correcting, scolding the people whose emotions they stirred, temporarily welding the hubbub of the public space into a chorus that sang in unison expressing a single desire.

Born in 1380 into the noble Sienese family of the Albizzeschi, Bernardino entered the Franciscan order in 1402. Here he learned the art of talking to ordinary people, drawing on all the tricks of a direct, physical, emotional rhetoric, disdaining neither facile effects nor theatrical gestures. Firstly in Umbria and Tuscany, and then in Lombardy and the region of Venice, his voice was heard, thunderous with menace, rousing the crowds. In Rome in particular, Bernardino caused disquiet: did he not risk neglecting the Trinity and the company of the saints by concentrating his teaching on the figure of Christ alone? In 1427, then again in 1431, Bernardino was placed under investigation. He was forced to retire to a monastery; he died in 1444 and was canonized six years later.

It was one year before his death that Sano di Pietro, the Sienese painter, depicted him standing in front of a large, orderly crowd, divided into two sections by a piece of cloth held across the square separating the two sexes. Such was the effect of his words: they enveloped, and they separated. From his pulpit, when he brandishes the IHS tablet bearing the name of Jesus with which the façade of the Palazzo Pubblico is also stamped, the preacher turns the entire city into a sounding board for the Church. There he stands, Bernardino, the shepherd of his flock, facing the campo. He speaks to arouse images in the minds of his audience. And frequently, as we are in Siena, he refers to the city’s great painters – Duccio, Simone Martini, the Lorenzetti brothers, all those who, in the years before the Black Death, turned the Tuscan city into the capital of political art or, more precisely, the capital of the politicization of art. This is not because art flatteringly extolled or symbolized the virtues of power: it is because the way that it categorized things in civic terms meant that the creation of pictures was seen by all as an essentially political business. Thus Bernardino put those images into words and uttered the names of the famous artists, the pride of the city, who had painted them.² Not to interpret these images, but so that his speech could draw on the impression they had left (as he hoped) in the memories of his listeners. In all his listeners, or more precisely in each individual listener, he awoke a memory, just as we sometimes walk in the footsteps of some ancient trace; and in this way he reawoke the aura of the work of art: ‘I thought of these images, painted for you.’

Two years later, on 15 August 1427, in a sermon on marital happiness and the hierarchy of the angels, Bernardino alluded to the Madonna attributed to Simone Martini and reworked in 1415 by Benedetto di Bindo. In September of that year, giving a sermon on the disciplined behaviour that young girls should adopt before marriage, he referred to another painting familiar to his Sienese audience: the Annunciation painted in 1333 by Simone Martini and his brother-in-law Lippo Memmi for the San Ansano altar in the Cathedral of Siena. We see him illustrating the reserve we must show if we are to protect ourselves from the temptations of the flesh, pointing dramatically to his right, indicating the grille on the window of the apartments of the Podestà. Later, on 25 September 1427, in a sermon that violently condemned sodomy, claiming that this vice was more widespread in Italy than elsewhere, Bernardino referred to the situation of Italy on the map of the world or mappemonde that Ambrogio Lorenzetti had painted in the hall of the Palazzo Pubblico. It still bears the same name today, the Sala del Mappamondo, and art historians ponder what that cosmogonic painting that made the immensity of the world so tangible must have looked like – but it can no longer be seen.

The people facing Bernardino, too, could not see the images that he projected in front of them in his words, penetrating through the façade of the Palazzo to which his back was turned. But they had seen those images, perhaps, or had heard about them; in any case they could imagine them. At least that is what the preacher supposed when he addressed his listeners in these words:

This Peace is such a sweet thing that it brings sweetness to one’s lips! And look at the word War, opposite! It is something so harsh, and brings such terrible savagery, that it makes the mouth bitter. Look! You have painted it up there, in your palace. Oh, painted Peace, what a joy it is to see it! Just as it is so sad to see War on the other side.³

This time it is Lorenzetti’s fresco which Bernardino is discussing. He says ‘in your palace’ – this is the meaning of the expression palazzo communale. Following the Peace of Constance (1182), which conceded to them the political rights the emperor had failed to keep for himself, the cities of communal Italy had adopted, for their own use, the grave and solemn name of palatium, in which we can hear the subtext of sovereignty. The bishop laid claim to this sovereignty, but it was now the comune which wielded it; and comune was first and foremost an adjective referring to nothing other than the sharing of power. That is why it is essential to the very idea of the communal palazzo that one could have free access to it – or, more precisely, that it was claimed that everyone could have access to it freely. So with the paintings inside, it was as if they could be seen from the square. Bernardino played on this fiction of transparency (which is perhaps one of the essential fictions of the political realm); he is standing outside and saying: ‘Look!’ But what is there to see? Images that refer you to two words that confront each other: peace and war. The first (pace) can be uttered with a gentle expression; when you say the second word (guerra), your face twists in a grimace.

Thus, the important thing about Bernardino’s sermon in 1427 is the way the preacher is asking his audience to ‘look at’ a public painting they cannot see, but that they may remember, precisely because it is public. So he is not really evoking images so much as the imprint they had left in a memory that we may imagine was collective. And this imprint is first and foremost verbal, that is, corporal: painting makes words visible, and it is these words that Bernardino requests his audience to look at directly, and what there is to see is nothing other than the physical effect that one feels, personally, when uttering these words. The mouth twists and grimaces if it has to say the word ‘war’ (guerra); it is mild and gentle when ‘peace’ (pace) brushes against its lips. And this is what I wish to focus on here: the emotion of desire or suffering in speaking bodies.

But something else is happening. To make his audience remember what we call the ‘Fresco of Good Government’, Bernardino talked about happiness and sadness, peace and war – and not about government. Unless, of course, we take this word in the sense it had in those days, as the pastoral conception of power over people, an idea that was common in the Christian Middle Ages. Regimen was the art of guiding the behaviour of other people while governing one’s own passions; ruling rightly and conducting oneself rightly were one and the same thing, one and the same impulse, for the priest and for the king, who both had the task of leading their flocks to salvation.⁴

Two years after originally mobilizing this series of civic images in his campaign to lead the faithful along the right path of an ethics that was inseparably political and domestic, in 1425, Bernardino of Siena was already preaching on the campo. The thirtieth sermon in the Lent cycle developed the theme of Psalm 133: Ecce quam bonum et quam jocundum habitare fratres in unum (‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!’). It was clearly a good day to talk about civic concord, and in this case, Bernardino presented his audience with Venice as a role model. He did so by first announcing his divisio: ‘Firstly, concord. Secondly, the love of one’s neighbour. Thirdly, the love between husband and wife.’ And as he developed his first point, he described at length Lorenzetti’s fresco:

When I was away from Siena preaching on War and Peace, I thought of these images, painted for you; they were definitely a very fine invention. When I turn to Peace, I see merchants coming and going. I see people dancing, repairing houses, working in the vineyards and on the land, sowing their seed, while others on horseback are heading out to bathe. I see girls going to a wedding, great flocks of sheep and many other things. And I also see a man who has been hanged so that holy justice will be maintained. And because of all this, everyone lives in holy peace and concord. Conversely, if I turn my gaze to look at the other side, I see neither traders nor dancers, but merely men killing other men; the houses are not being repaired but demolished and set on fire, the fields are no longer being worked; the vines are cut down, nobody is sowing the seed, nobody is going to bathe, and nobody can indulge in any pleasure – all I see is people leaving the city. Ah, women! Ah, men! The men are killed, the women raped, there is no flock other than the flock being dragged away as booty, men are killing each other, justice has been laid low, the scales in the balance have been broken, people are tied up in chains. And everything that is being done is done in a state of fear.⁵

Bernardino is not here describing an image, but the memory you retain of an image as you move away from it. Above all, it is really a vision that immediately twists the body – painfully, one imagines: when I turn one way, I see this, and when I turn the other way, I see that. This then that, peace and war, and nothing else. It is as if the room painted by Lorenzetti had only two walls, the two long walls which display what modern commentators call the ‘effects’ of good and bad government, with the emphasis always more on the former than on the latter, whereas it is obvious that Bernardino envisaged them as two equal parts of the same sensory experience.⁶ And so this experience concerns peace and war; or, as we have said, words to utter but also figures to contemplate – here, justice ‘tied up in chains’ refers of course to its feminine allegory, which is indeed represented on the fresco. But both words and figures refer mainly to situations, that is, to configurations of historical time, which Bernardino essentially characterizes through their relationship with fear: the time of war is the time when everything happens under the constraint of a single feeling, that of terror; the time of peace is shown by the liberty of bodies in movement, coming and going, acting or remaining at rest, indulging in the freedom and joy of life, and always, as one of the inscriptions on the fresco proclaims, senza paura (without fear).

So we see them just as Bernardino saw them, people working and people dancing, those who stroll around and those who are hard at work, the merchants in the city and the peasants who have set off to trim the vines, the girl in all her finery ready for the wedding, trotting along so proudly. And we also see, because he forces us to see them, women being raped and houses on fire, the brutality of the soldiers and the waste land – everything which forms the dismaying spectacle on the other side. But there are also the things that strike Bernardino’s imagination and that we can no longer see, at least not in the same way as he did. The little man hanging from the gibbet, held by the half-naked allegory of Securitas, certainly escapes the attention of many (even attentive) observers today as they gaze at Lorenzetti’s ‘very fine invention’. And yet, for the preacher, this is such a striking image that he sees it as opportune to refer to its memory in the minds of his flock; maybe this is because it is one of the keys to this work of art; and in any case we cannot trust our own impressions to measure the political force of images. And what about those men going to bathe on the one side while being prevented from doing so on the other? Where can Bernardino actually see them? Here, clearly, he is extrapolating. So the historian needs to draw on what he or she knows about the social importance of thermal baths in Sienese territory to understand the way in which those in the quattrocento whose eyes rested on Lorenzetti’s fresco (and this was definitely true a century earlier, at the time it was painted) naturally extended the itineraries of the characters depicted, taking them to the Bagno di Petriolo or other bathing places that were familiar to them.⁷ The image runs on, far away from us, suggesting what lies beyond the frame.

There is also, even more important, something which Bernardino does not talk about. Where are the allegorical figures on the little north wall that today’s historians of ideas find so captivating? If we follow the preacher’s words, we see neither the venerable old man proudly brandishing the insignia of sovereignty, nor the feminine figures creating a garland of virtues around him, and certainly nothing that constitutes the ‘Fresco of Good Government’ as the very image of our modernity. So it is not the principles that are important, but the effects – not good and bad government so much as peace and war. And that is why the hall which it honours with the dignity of these figures was called, and would be called until at least the nineteenth century, the Sala della Pace (Hall of Peace).⁸ Admittedly, the universality of such a theme is likely to resist the political vicissitudes that risk making the fresco’s partisan message seem anachronistic: what meaning could it have in the Italy of the quattrocento, when communal resistance to this version of seignorial authority seemed to be an old question, one that was now largely outmoded by the triumphant new order of the princes?

This, at least, is the interpretation of the image that Bernardino wanted to provide. Are we obliged to follow him? After all, this Franciscan friar forces the meaning of the fresco’s composition by coming between the work of art and us, subjugating it to the evocative power of his words; he imposes a clerical mediation, refers to ‘holy peace’, while nothing or almost nothing in the painting refers to God. We no longer need the preacher to trace the meaning of things – not even to ‘be an effective educator’ in the way so often advocated in the sickly infantilizing language of political communication these days. So we might be tempted to say: let’s go and take a look, since the image is there, fragmented and available like a digital cloud; let’s go and take a look, free and unhampered as we are. But hold on: we can see hardly anything. Between the image and us there hover shades that we need to disperse. These are the shades of all the gazes that have already rested on this image.

The Power of Images

Siena, 1338

Foreword

Notes

Acknowledgements

Prologue
The site of an ancient urgency

1
‘I thought of these images, painted for you’

Notes