Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- General preface
- Full contents: Volumes 1–3
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The reality of the Renaissance
- 2 The rediscovery of republican values
- 3 Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government
- 4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics
- 5 Republican virtues in an age of princes
- 6 Machiavelli on virtù and the maintenance of liberty
- 7 The idea of negative liberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives
- 8 Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility
- 9 Humanism, scholasticism and popular sovereignty
- 10 Moral ambiguity and the Renaissance art of eloquence
- 11 John Milton and the politics of slavery
- 12 Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war
- 13 Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought
- 14 From the state of princes to the person of the state
- Bibliographies
- Index
- Plate section
3 - Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of plates
- General preface
- Full contents: Volumes 1–3
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- 1 Introduction: The reality of the Renaissance
- 2 The rediscovery of republican values
- 3 Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the portrayal of virtuous government
- 4 Ambrogio Lorenzetti on the power and glory of republics
- 5 Republican virtues in an age of princes
- 6 Machiavelli on virtù and the maintenance of liberty
- 7 The idea of negative liberty: Machiavellian and modern perspectives
- 8 Thomas More's Utopia and the virtue of true nobility
- 9 Humanism, scholasticism and popular sovereignty
- 10 Moral ambiguity and the Renaissance art of eloquence
- 11 John Milton and the politics of slavery
- 12 Classical liberty, Renaissance translation and the English civil war
- 13 Augustan party politics and Renaissance constitutional thought
- 14 From the state of princes to the person of the state
- Bibliographies
- Index
- Plate section
Summary
Between the early thirteenth and mid-fourteenth centuries, the city-republics of the Regnum Italicum engendered a distinctive political literature concerned with the ideals and methods of republican self-government. As we saw in chapter 2, several of the most eminent philosophers of the age took part in the argument, including St Thomas Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua. But it was an artist, Ambrogio Lorenzetti of Siena, who made the most memorable contribution to the debate. This took the form of the celebrated cycle of frescoes he painted between 1337 and 1339 in the Sala dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. Although it is obvious that these paintings do not constitute a text of political theory in the conventional sense, it is equally obvious even to the casual observer that they are basically intended to convey a series of political messages. It is with the question of how to read and interpret those messages that I shall principally be concerned.
I wish in particular to re-examine the central section of the frescoes, the section that occupies the middle level of the northern wall (see Plate 3). As the verses inscribed beneath this part of the painting explain, the painting itself is intended to represent that form of government which we are bound to establish if we are induced to act exclusively by the dictates of the holy virtue of justice.
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- Visions of Politics , pp. 39 - 92Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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