A time of “great and perilous change”

I present here some early results of research I have undertaken on the various transformations in the way legitimation was imagined and portrayed in communal and seigniorial Italy during the 1330s. The fourth decade of the Trecento appears in effect as a time of delicate, profound transformation of the social and political balance in the cities traditionally governed as communes. Giovanni Tabacco and Giorgio Chittolini have captured the maturing in the central decades of the century of processes of hierarchization of power and emergence of more rigid forms of government. But the changes that took place in the 1330s have not yet been the object of specific attention. In the following pages I would like to initiate a first attempt at reflection, moving from a perspective – that of the emotions, feelings, and moods of the time – which seems to me to offer an invaluable key to reading the sense of a sharp break which many people felt in those years.

My interest was piqued when I noticed a number of temporal coincidences that aroused my curiosity. Based on the installment of the payments, art historians agree by now in dating between 1338 and 1339 the frescoes painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the room in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico where the governing Council of Nine met. The idea of commissioning a fresco cycle with a broad political significance must have come to maturity in the period immediately preceding this date: let us say, at most, between 1336 and 1337. Giovanni Villani, for his part, devotes four ample chapters in book XII of his chronicle to the “greatness and state of the city of Florence,” in which he describes analytically the receipts and expenditures of the commune from 1336 to 1338, coincident with the period when the fresco commissioned by the Nine in Siena was being conceived and executed. Finally, the vast fresco cycle in the Camposanto in Pisa, which opens with the so-called Triumph of Death, has been authoritatively assigned to the hand of Buonamico Buffalmacco and dated “a little earlier than the threeyear period 1338-1340,” more precisely between 1336 and 1338, to a “date just before the time of execution of the frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.”