As good as gold

The glittering, jewel-like works by early-14th-century Sienese painters reflected the splendour of the city’s heyday and went on to influence courtly art as far afield as Britain and Bohemia, as Mary Miers discovers

- Mary Miers

IN his celebrated Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Government (1338– 39), Ambrogio Lorenzetti depicts an idealised Siena as the model of civic and social order. Against a panoramic backdrop of castellated buildings and vine-terraced hills, shopkeepers and packhorse tradesmen ply their wares, as peasants till the fields and hunting nobles ride out into the Tuscan campagna through open, but well-fortified, city gates. Ground-breaking for their secular theme, Ambrogio’s frescos in the Palazzo Pubblico’s Sala dei Nove loomed over meetings of the elected officials of the Guelph oligarchy that ruled Siena. Peace with archrival Florence had ushered in a period of stability and the beautiful brick-built city was clamorous again with pageantry and its legendary horse races. Plans were under way for a vast extension to the cathedral, the showcase for superb works of sculpture and painting, and construction had begun on the town hall’s dizzying campanile, the bells of which, it was said, could be heard in Rome. Merchants, craftsmen and money changers established themselves along the principal thoroughfares, trading furs and leatherwork, lapis lazuli, ‘Saracen’ carpets and ‘Tartar cloths’. Goldsmiths created composite artworks of breathtaking ingenuity and financiers established the world’s first bank.