The Story of Siena and San Gimignano

Out of this hall we pass into the Sala della Pace, originally called the Sala dei Nove, where the Nine met during that most glorious epoch in Sienese history when they held sway. In 1337 they appointed Ambrogio Lorenzetti to decorate their meeting-place with allegorical frescoes. We see the master’s signature, Ambrosius Laurentii de Senis, under the great fresco – the first of the series – on the wall opposite the window. Here on our left is Justice, enthroned as Queen, inspired from above by the crowned genius of Celestial Wisdom. Over her head is the text from the Wisdom of Solomon, which Dante’s spirits of righteous rulers formed in that sixth sphere of Paradise that is swayed by the celestial Dominations: “Love righteousness, ye that be judges of the earth.” On her right and left respectively, the Angel of Distributive Justice crowns one and beheads another, the Angel of Commutative Justice gives weapons to one and money to another. At her feet sits Concord, a beautiful woman upon whose brow rests the pentecostal tongue of fire; she holds two cords that proceed from the scales of Justice, uniting the twenty-four citizens who pass in procession to the feet of the Commune of Siena. This is represented by a majestic old man, richly clothed in robes that show the black and white of the republican shield, royally crowned. The mystical cord of union is attached to his sceptre, and in his other hand he holds an image of the Blessed Virgin, whom the Sienese had chosen for their Sovereign Lady. He sits above the Wolf and the Twins. Faith, Hope and Charity hover above his head; Prudence and Fortitude, Magnanimity and Temperance are his assessors. Beyond them, on the right of the throne, reclines golden-haired Peace, in her clinging white robe; and on the left, Legal Justice sits, with a crown and a severed head on her lap. Around are steel-clad warriors, horse and foot – the armed forces of the Republic – while to the gate of the city men come offering “censi, tributi e signorie di terre,” as one of the verses of the inscription, which is probably Ambrogio’s own, puts it; prisoners are led in in fetters, and others are rigorously kept excluded – for the mediaeval mind can hardly conceive of good government without fuorusciti.

On the right wall are shown the effects of good government, the rule of Justice. “Turn your eyes to gaze upon her who is figured here – O ye that rule! – and who is crowned for her excellence”; so runs the inscription. “Behold what great good things come from her, and how sweet and restful is the life of the city where that virtue is preserved that gloweth back more than any other.” Within the city are dancing and feasting; the shops are full and trade flourishes; cavalcades of dames and cavaliers pass through the streets. Beyond the walls unarmed trains pass out to the chase; the fields are cultivated, the peasants fearlessly bringing their produce into the city. In the distance is the sea – for the righteous republic will have commerce and become a maritime power – and a harbour said to represent Talamone. Over all hovers Security, a winged woman with a little gallows and a scroll: “Without fear may every one travel freely and each man work and sow, whilst the Commune will maintain this Lady in signory, for she has taken all power from the wicked.”

On the opposite wall is Evil Government, the fruits of Injustice. Tyranny, a hideous horned monster, with dagger and poisoned cup, sits enthroned above a goat. Avarice, Pride and Vainglory float over him. Foul and horrible shapes sit round him as ministers: Cruelty (torturing a child), Treason and Fraud, Fury, Division and War. At his feet lies Justice – dishevelled, overthrown, bound. Murder and outrage wanton within and without the walls; the smiling fields are devastated, while at the gate of the ruined, bloodstained city hovers the dark and ragged demon of Fear, with a scroll: “Through selfish ambition in this city has Justice been subjected to Tyranny; wherefore by this way no one passes without dread of death: for without and within the gates they plunder.”74

Beyond the Sala delle Balestre is the Chapel of the Palace. The antechapel, the walls and the roof of the chapel itself are covered with frescoes by Taddeo di Bartolo – frescoes that are the first great Sienese achievement in painting in the Quattrocento – executed between 1406 and 1414. On the walls and arches of the antechapel are Roman heroes and philosophers of antiquity; Apollo and Minerva, Jupiter and Mars; a view of the Eternal City; and, over the door that leads into the room adjoining the consistory, a gigantic St Christopher. The Sienese claim, not without reason, that Perugino himself imitated these frescoes nearly a hundred years later, in the Sala del Cambio at Perugia. In the chapel are saints and Angels and the four closing scenes of the Madonna’s life; her farewell to the Apostles, her death, her being carried upon the bier, and lastly her Assumption – the Divine Son sweeping down with Cherubim and Seraphim to draw His Mother from the grave. Among all the Italian pictures of the Assumption, Taddeo’s still can hold its own for its vividness and originality. For the rest, the whole chapel is a perfect gem of the arts and crafts of the early Quattrocento. The holy water stoop is by Giovanni di Turino, the iron railing by Giacomo di Giovanni; the beautiful stalls of the choir, carved and inlaid with illustrations to the Nicene Creed, were executed by Domenico di Niccolò, afterwards called Domenico del Coro, between 1415 and 1428, and may possibly have been designed by Taddeo di Bartolo. Under the Nativity, on the little wooden door between the chapel and the Sala di Balìa is the Wheel of Fortune, on which man is seen transformed to ass as he rises, recovering human shape as he falls. To a later period belong only the organ with Siena’s wolf, which is a work of the early Cinquecento, and the altarpiece. The latter, by Bazzi and one of his later works, was originally in the Duomo; it represents the Madonna and Child with St Joseph and St Calixtus, with a beautiful landscape background in which the ruins of ancient Rome are seen. “This work,” says Vasari, “is likewise held to be very beautiful, inasmuch as one sees that Sodoma in colouring it used much more diligence than he was wont to do in his things.”

We pass next into a small passage or anteroom, out of which the Sala di Concistoro opens on the left, the Sala di Balìa on the right. In the former, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the Signoria met, the nominal governors of the State; in the latter, the Collegio di Balìa, the select committee that in reality held the Republic in its hands. There are bits of old fresco in this waiting room – Madonnas and Saints, a kneeling magistrate watched over by his celestial patron – and several panels of the Quattrocento; especially a Madonna and Child with four Angels in an old frame, dated 1484, by Matteo di Giovanni, and San Bernardino preaching in the Campo and liberating a possessed woman after his death, ascribed by Mr Berenson to Vecchietta.

The Sala di Concistoro, with a marble doorway ascribed to Giacomo della Quercia, has a ceiling covered with frescoes by Domenico Beccafumi, painted between 1529 and 1535 – precisely at the time when his rival, Bazzi, was working on his saints in the other hall. They represent scenes from Roman and Greek history, with allegorical figures of Concord and Justice, and are extravagantly praised by Vasari, who declares that the Justice in particular is painted “so powerfully that it is a marvel.” The foreshortening, the effects of light and shade are certainly exceedingly clever; but it is a little too much to say, as Lanzi does, that “Beccafumi should be called the Correggio of lower Italy.”

The pictorial decorations of the Sala di Balìa were commissioned by the Signoria in 1407, and begun in the following year. The Virtues on the ceiling are by Martino di Bartolommeo Sensi, a Sienese painter who belonged to the order of the Riformatori and whose chief works are in the neighbourhood of Pisa. The scenes on the walls are by Spinello Aretino, the Aretine who ranks as the last of the Giotteschi and who was then nearly eighty years old, and his son Parri. They represent the life of the great Sienese Pope, Alexander III., but are not arranged in chronological order and the subjects are frequently doubtful. Among them we may notice the Pope giving a blessed sword to the Doge of Venice, Sebastiano Ziani, on the wall opposite the first window; on the entrance wall, the capture of an Italian town by the imperialists and the naval victory of the Venetians on Ascension Day, 1176, in which the Caesar’s son Otto was taken prisoner. The latter scene is a splendid rendering of mediaeval naval warfare – note especially, on the right, the episode of the capture of the prince and the frenzied efforts of the imperialists to rescue him. The second fresco on the arch probably represents the recognition of the Pope, when disguised as a monk at Venice, by a French pilgrim. On the wall opposite the second window is the building of Alessandria with its elevation into a Bishopric, and, apparently, the humiliation of the Emperor Barbarossa. There is a curious representation of the burning of a heretic on the arch. Opposite the entrance is the presentation of the captured prince to the Pope, and the latter’s triumphal procession with the Emperor and the Doge leading his horse. Beyond is the Sala Monumentale, painted in honour of Vittorio Emanuele II. by modern Sienese artists with certain great scenes in the story of the unification of Italy – the armistice after Novara, the battles of San Martino and Palestro, the meeting of Vittorio Emanuele and Garibaldi, the Roman Plebiscite and the funeral of the King. With the impartiality that, in some respects, is characteristic of modern Italy, Alexander III. is represented in one of the medallions among the precursors of the political regeneration of his country.

In this Sala di Balìa– then called the Sala del Papa – there was a notable tragedy enacted in 1455, in the very year that the “Magistracy of the Fifteen of the Balìa” was first instituted – originally of fifteen citizens to superintend the prosecution of the war against Piccinino. The commander of the Sienese forces, Count Giberto da Correggio, was in secret treaty with the enemy, sent him supplies while Siena starved, and attempted to occupy Grosseto on his own account. The government was warned by the officers of the Duke of Milan that their general was going to betray them, but the Balìa had already ample proofs in its hands; not daring to arrest him in the midst of his troops, they waited their time. “What human cunning could devise no means to do,” writes Malavolti, somewhat sanctimoniously, “was easily ordained by the Divine Justice, that seldom suffers such enormous crimes to remain unpunished.” They heard that, on September 6th, the Count would come to the city, to demand payment of a large sum of money which he claimed from the government. The morning that he was expected, the Fifteen met, reviewed the evidence against him, and decided upon their measures. The Count confidently entered the city with thirty horsemen, rode to the Palazzo de’ Marescotti (the present Palazzo Saracini), where he had apartments, and demanded an audience of the Balìa. In the evening four nobles of the city, with a number of citizens and the trumpeters of the Signoria, came to bring him in state to the Palace for the audience that he had demanded. The Count and his chancellor went up into the chapel, while the doors of the Palace were closed and his other attendants detained in the Sala delle Balestre. When all was ready, the Count was called before the Fifteen in the Sala di Balìa – the Priors being meanwhile assembled in the Sala di Concistoro. Perhaps he passed through that little door upon which even then was the design of Fortune’s wheel. With all marks of honour and respect, he was invited to seat himself with the Fifteen, by the side of the Prior of the Balìa, and questioned about what had gone on in the field. He answered insolently and proudly – upon which he was accused to his face of treason, and the intercepted letters shown him that he had interchanged with Piccinino. He sprang to his feet: “What! do you imagine that I am a prisoner in your hands?” “Quite otherwise,” answered Lodovico Petroni, one of the Fifteen, seizing hold of his cloak. At the signal armed men rushed in – they had been lying in wait in the room beyond – and stabbed him to death. The still quivering body was dragged to the window and hurled out on to the pavement below. Later on, it was carried to the Duomo and buried near the Campanile, without any honour or name to mark the spot. That same night the Balìa notified to the Pope and their other allies what had been done. To his Holiness they declared that “this astute seminator of evil, this your insidious foe, this traitor to our Republic” had been done to death by the people in a tumult; to the Duke of Milan they sent a piece of his cloak, drenched in blood; to Venice and to Florence they told the truth, pleading the sacred duty of saving the State, citing as precedents the deaths of Carmagnola and Baldaccio d’Anghiari. Pope Calixtus insisted that they should justify themselves by publishing the evidence, and when this was done, on September 18th, he absolved the Fifteen, each severally by name. But to the appeal of the Sienese envoys for a general absolution for all the people of the city, he replied that he could not grant it, “because you Sienese would be too strong in Paradise.”75

Two antique coffers in this room – one of them with the Lupa carved by Antonio Barili – are also worthy of notice. In the Loggia on the second floor of the Palace is a frescoed Madonna and Child by Ambrogio Lorenzetti.

The second door to the left of the wolf in the Piazza leads, through a picturesque little court covered with old frescoes, to a series of rooms on the ground floor, at present used by the municipality. In the Sala dei Signori di Biccherna, the room in which the Camarlingo and Quattro Provveditori met, is the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin, a fresco painted in 1445 by Sano di Pietro. Two of the Angels are holding a scroll with a poem, thus blending painting and poetry together in the characteristic early Sienese way: “This blessed glorious Virgin pure, Daughter of her Son and Spouse and Mother – because the Eternal Father found her more humble than any other person, He giveth her here the crown of the Universe. Virgin Mother of the Eternal God, by whose holy hands thou art crowned, to thee be recommended the devout and faithful city of Siena, as it hopeth in thee; hail, full of grace.” The San Bernardino on the right is also by Sano. In the same room there is a small fresco by Bazzi – the Madonna and Child with the little St John, St Michael Archangel and St Galganus. Like all his work in the Palace it is late, about 1537, but, unlike the rest, it is badly drawn and carelessly executed.

In the Stanza del Sindaco there is a much finer fresco of Bazzi’s – the Resurrection of Christ, with the three Maries approaching through the early spring landscape. It was originally painted, probably in 1535, in the place where the salt was sold, and was sawn out in the last century. Vasari specially praises the beauty of the Angels’ heads. In another room is a frescoed Madonna by Vecchietta. On the ground floor is also the entrance to what during the fifteenth century was the Sala del Gran Consiglio, but which in the latter part of the sixteenth century, after the final fall of the Republic, was converted into a theatre.

At the back of the Palace is the picturesque market-place, the Piazza del Mercato. Out of the market, the Via de’ Malcontenti and the Via di Porta Giustizia still indicate the ways by which condemned prisoners were conveyed in carts to the place of execution beyond the walls. We know that the feet of St Catherine frequently trode this mediaeval via crucis; but it is questionable whether the execution of Niccolò di Toldo took place in the ordinary spot, as there is frequent record of political prisoners being done to death in front of the Palace and elsewhere. In his fresco in San Domenico, Bazzi seems to identify the place with the little valley before us, between the hills of Montone and Santa Agata, crowned by the churches of the Servites and Augustinians.

CHAPTER VI

The Duomo and the Baptistery

RISING majestically above Siena, crowned with the mosaic of the Coronation of the Blessed Virgin in Paradise, as though to make her seem still floating in air over the city that had chosen her for Queen, is the vast Duomo. Tradition has it that a temple of Minerva once stood upon this hill, and that upon its ruins was built the first fane to Maria Assunta, Our Lady of the Assumption.

Some such building had existed from the end of the tenth century; but the present “tiger-striped cathedral,” the most truly Gothic of all ecclesiastical buildings in Tuscany, belongs for the most part to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The hexagonal cupola was finished in 1264, four years after Montaperti and the year before Dante’s birth. The Campanile, with its curious turrets at the angles, was built in the following century. But the original building did not satisfy the Nine and the turbulent, prosperous citizens that they ruled. While prolonging the Duomo Vecchio, as it was called, to the east up to the present Baptistery (in those very years, between 1317 and 1321, in which Dante was at Ravenna, finishing his Paradiso), defects were discovered in the architecture; and in February 1322 (1321 in the old Sienese style) Lorenzo Maitani, with four other masters, proposed to the General Council of the Campana that a new cathedral should be erected: “we advise that, to the honour of God and of the Blessed Virgin Mary, His Most Holy Mother – who ever was, is, and will be in time to come, the Head of this city of Siena – there be begun and made a beauteous, great and magnificent church, which shall be well-proportioned in length, height, and breadth, and in all measures which pertain to a beauteous church, and with all splendid ornaments which pertain to and befit so great, so honourable and beauteous a church; to the end that our Lord Jesus Christ and His most holy Mother, and His most high celestial court, in that church may be blessed and glorified in hymns, and the said Commune of Siena be ever protected by them from adversity and be honoured perpetually.”76 It was decided that the old Duomo should be preserved; but merely as the transept of this new ecclesia pulchra, magna et magnifica; and in December 1339 the new nave was begun, the architect Pietro di Lando, who was then working for King Robert of Naples, being summoned back to Siena to superintend, as “a man of great subtlety and invention.” He was succeeded by Giovanni di Agostino; but the pestilence of 1348, followed by the fall of the Nine in 1355, caused the work to be abandoned. The Sienese turned back to their Duomo Vecchio with renewed vigour, and, in the early years of the fifteenth century, the great work was practically completed – before Brunelleschi had crowned the rival Cathedral of Florence with his mighty dome.

Going up the Via di Monna Agnese, or climbing the steps from the Baptistery, we pass under a richly-worked doorway, in the tympanum of which the Redeemer is enthroned with Angels. This would have been a door at the end of the right aisle. As it is, it leads us into a spacious piazza, with the Duomo, as at present constructed, on our right. On the left is the huge unfinished façade of the abandoned Duomo of Pietro di Lando and Giovanni di Agostino, with what would have been the principal entrance from the Via di Città. The tricuspidate façade of the present cathedral, in black, white and red marble, covered with statuary, was mainly constructed in the last two decades of the thirteenth century under the superintendence of Giovanni di Niccolò Pisano; but all the chief sculptors of the Sienese school have worked upon it, down to the latter part of the fifteenth century. The majority of the statues that we now see are modern copies of the originals, and almost the whole has been completely restored. The mosaics in the cuspidi are modern Venetian work, from the designs of Mussini and Franchi. Upon the platform is represented in graffito the Parable of the Publican and the Pharisee; similarly, at the three doors, are three scenes from the administration of Holy Orders. These were originally executed in the sixteenth century, but have been restored and altered. Before entering the sacred building, the tablet should be noticed, set into the wall of the Vescovado, the Archbishop’s palace on the left: “Hoc est sepulcrum magistri Ioannis quondam magistri Nicolai et de eius eredibus.” It is the tombstone of Giovanni Pisano himself, who was buried in the cloister of the Canons, between the Duomo and the Vescovado.

The peculiar beauty of the interior of the Duomo is due to the fact that we have Gothic architecture, combined with decoration that is almost entirely in the style and taste of the fifteenth century. Gothic austerity is tempered here with the grace and fascination of the early Renaissance. The terra-cotta busts of the Popes in the cornice along the nave and choir belong to the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries. They make a strangely impressive series, these crowned Vicars of Christ, who Himself is seen in the midst of them, immediately under the eastern window. They stretch from Peter in a continuous chronological line round the church, to Lucius III., who sat on the Throne of the Fisherman from 1181 to 1185, succeeding to Alexander III., when our Henry II. reigned in England. They are solemn and dignified – the ideal Pontiffs of the closing chapter of Dante’s De Monarchia, “who in accordance with things revealed should lead the human race to eternal life.” But there is naturally no attempt or thought of portraiture: some of Hildebrand’s infamous predecessors are conceived and represented in the same spirit as he who said: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity: therefore, I die in exile.” Below them are similar busts of Roman Emperors, the supreme temporal rulers of the world in Dante’s dual scheme, “who in accordance with the teachings of philosophy should direct the human race to temporal felicity.”

The famous pavement of the Duomo – a thing unique of its kind – might well have paved the first terrace of Dante’s Mountain of Purgation. The tradition that this work was originally designed by Duccio (from which it would follow that Dante himself may have seen its first beginnings) is now almost entirely rejected. Documentary evidence proves that it was not begun until the year 1369, shortly after the resumption of work upon the Duomo Vecchio. The greater part of it was laid down after Giovanni da Spoleto77 in 1396 had begun publicly to expound the Divina Commedia in the Studio of Siena, and we can readily imagine that the men under whose superintendence it was done had in their minds those superb terzine in which the divine poet describes the figured scenes over which his feet passed to meet that creatura bella, the Angel of Humility, whose face was like the morning star.78 With one solitary exception – the rout of the Assyrians after the death of Holofernes – the subjects shown here are not the same as those on Dante’s duro pavimento. Instead of the examples of the punishment of pride, we have here a series of scenes which can hardly be said to be dominated by one idea, but which in the main (a few scenes standing apart, unconnected with the general scheme), through symbol, type and prophecy, lead up to the Sacrifice of Isaac before the High Altar, as mystically representing the Atonement of Calvary, renewed daily in the Sacrifice of the Mass. In the earliest of these commessi and graffiti, white and black marbles alone are used; later, coloured marbles are employed as well, both in shading and in the decorative portions. Executed at various dates, for the most part in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they have been frequently altered and restored, while in some instances modern copies have been substituted for the originals. Save in the season of the feast of the Assumption, the central portions are kept covered.

The pavement of the nave and aisles is a preparation, in some sort, for the rest. In the nave is first Hermes Mercurius Trismegistus, “Contemporaneus Moysi,” with two disciples – symbolical of the mystical wisdom of the Ancients, “when sages looked to Egypt for their lore.” It was executed in 1488 from the designs of Giovanni di Stefano. Next comes Siena herself, represented by the Lupa suckling the Twins, surrounded with the heraldic beasts of the allied cities; this was originally executed in 1373, and (unlike the rest of the pavement) in mosaic, but the present piece is a modern copy. She is followed – in token of what her chroniclers call her perpetual fidelity to the Caesarian Monarchy – by a wheel with the Imperial Eagle in the centre, of the same year. Then follow two allegories of human life, under the sway of Fortune, “who hath the goods of the world so in her clutch.” The first is the so-called Storia della Fortuna, designed by Pinturicchio in 1505.79 Fortune has landed ten of her subjects on the shore of a solitary island mountain, the paths of which are stony, and where reptiles lurk and crawl. Some run steadfastly on to seek wisdom; one sinks down to rest by the way, wearied already of the quest; one gazes longingly back, another shakes his fist at his mistress. “But she is blessed and heareth not that,” as Dante has it, as she spreads her sail to catch the breeze, and steps off again into her storm-shattered bark to fetch new votaries. Above all change and alien influence, in the flowery garden that crowns the mountain like Dante’s Earthly Paradise, sits Wisdom enthroned, with palm and book; on her right Socrates receives the palm, on her left Crates is casting jewels into the sea; the obvious meaning being that wisdom can be reached only by pursuit of knowledge and contempt of riches. The second, an allegory of ambition, a modern copy of a work originally executed in 1372, shows a crowned king enthroned on the summit of Fortune’s wheel; clinging desperately to the sides of the wheel are men struggling up to take his place or falling from it, while in the corners the sages of antiquity moralise upon the scene. On the pavement of the aisles are the ten Sibyls, inspired prophetesses of the Incarnation and Redemption among the pagans and gentiles. They were laid down in 1482 and 1483, under the rectorship of Alberto Aringhieri, to whose care so much of the beautiful decoration of the Duomo is due; but they have all been restored. In the right aisle we see the Delphic Sibyl, designed and executed by Giuliano di Biagio and Vito di Marco; the Cumaean Sibyl, ascribed to Luigi di Ruggiero and Vito di Marco;80 the Cuman Sibyl, with the golden bough and the famous Virgilian prophecy, designed and executed by Giovanni di Stefano; the Erythraean Sibyl, designed and executed, also signed, by Antonio Federighi; the Persian Sibyl, which appears to be mainly the work of Urbano da Cortona. In the left aisle are: the Libyan Sibyl, designed by Guidoccio Cozzarelli; the Hellespontine Sibyl, designed by Neroccio di Bartolommeo Landi;81 the Phrygian Sibyl, probably, like her Cimmerian sister, designed and executed by Luigi di Ruggiero and Vito di Marco; the Samian Sibyl, designed by Matteo di Giovanni and with his signature; the Albunean Sibyl, designed by Benvenuto di Giovanni.82 These ten figures are among the most characteristic products of Sienese art of the Quattrocento.