Painted for the ear: Ambrogio Lorenzetti's “Fraud” and political oratory

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author would like to thank Brigitte Buettner, Cecily J. Hilsdale, Timothy McCall, Nenette Luarca-Shoaf, and the anonymous reader for Word & Image for their useful comments on various drafts of this paper. He is also grateful for remarks he received after presenting some of this material in 2005 at the International Congress for Medieval Studies, Western Michigan University, and at the Visual Culture Colloquium, Bryn Mawr College, in 2008. Two grants from Ursinus College supported research and travel for this project, and a semester of pre-tenure leave enabled him to complete the manuscript. The interlibrary loan staff at Myrin Library (Ursinus College), including Dominique de Saint Etienne, were helpful as well. Notes 1 – Hans Belting, ‘The new role of narrative in public painting of the Trecento: Historia and allegory,’ in Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Marianna Shreve Simpson (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1985), pp. 159–60; Randolph Starn and Loren Partridge, Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 45; and Enrico Castelnuovo, ‘Famosissimo et singularissimo maestro,’ in Ambrogio Lorenzetti: Il Buon Governo, ed. Enrico Castelnuovo (Milan: Electa, 1995), pp. 9–22, here p. 9–20. 2 – Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, pp. 28–52; Maria Monica Donato, ‘La “bellissima inventiva”: immagini e idee nella sala della pace,’ in Ambrogio Lorenzetti, pp. 23–41, here pp. 29–30, 35; and Furio Brugnolo, ‘Le iscrizioni in volgare: testo e commento,’ in Ambrogio Lorenzetti, pp. 381–91. 3 – In general the question of vocalization has been largely mute in histories of art in late medieval Italy, including studies of ‘speaking’ images and ‘visible speech’ (visibile parlare). On notions of dialogue between images and viewers, see Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 351–52, 367, 376, 390, 393; and Jens T. Wollesen, ‘Spoken words and images in late medieval Italian painting,’ in Oral History of the Middle Ages: The Spoken Word in Context, ed. Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter (Budapest: Medium Aevum Quotidianum, 2001), pp. 257–76. The term visibile parlare, which comes from Dante's Purgatorio (10.95), has been applied by scholars to depictions of spoken words and of individuals speaking or responding to speech. See Roger Tarr, ‘“Visibile parlare”: The spoken word in fourteenth-century central Italian painting,’ Word & Image 13, no. 3 (July – Sept. 1997), pp. 223–44. Tarr was concerned to demonstrate relationships between painting and poetry, and argued that the art of Ambrogio Lorenzetti and other Sienese painters was ‘based on the same imaginative assumption [as poetry], that the medium in each case can be imbued with the latent power of speech’ (p. 236). My own study agrees with that view, but also explores what such power could mean, and what its limits may have been, in a complex communicative environment. The attention my paper gives to social factors in that environment aligns with C. Jean Campbell's observation that ‘[i]n a society, like that of the early communes, that depended at various levels and very heavily upon the skills of professional rhetoricians and artists – notaries, speechmakers, diplomats, poets, and painters – to represent their interests, the old problem of representation become deeply socially engaged.’ C. Jean Campbell, The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano, 1290–1320 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 182. 4 – Brunetto Latini, Li livres dou tresor (trans. Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin), p. 3.1.2. On relationships between the frescoes in the room of the Nine and Latini's Tresor, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti: the artist as political philosopher,’ Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986), pp. 1–56; Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, pp. 35–36, 40–44, 45; and Mechtild Modersohn, ‘Lust auf Frieden. Brunetto Latini und die Fresken von Ambrogio Lorenzetti im Rathaus zu Siena,’ in Bildnis und Image: Das Portrait zwischen Intention und Rezeption, ed. Andreas Köstler and Ernst Seidl (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), pp. 85–118. 5 – My discussion of the Nine relies heavily on William M. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena under the Nine, 1287–1355 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981). 6 – Ibid., pp. 56, 57. ‘Bad government’ is located on the room's west wall, while ‘good government’ spans the north and east walls. The arrangement of seats and tables in the room is unknown, though Starn and Partridge speculate that the Nine sat on a platform against the north wall with personifications of ‘good government’ behind them. In that arrangement, the Nine would have seen Fraus on the wall to their right. Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, p. 18. 7 – Bowsky, Siena, p. 291. The notion that the frescoes’ intended audience extended well beyond the Nine has been generally assumed by scholars. Early descriptions of the frescoes, the earliest written in 1350, imply public familiarity with them. See Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, ‘War and peace: The description of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes in Saint Bernardino's 1425 Siena sermons,’ Renaissance Studies 15, no. 3 (2001), pp. 272–86. 8 – Bowsky, Siena, pp. 86–87, 100. 9 – Latini, Tresor, p. 1.4.9–10. On the study of rhetoric in late medieval Siena, see Gianfranco Fioravanti, ‘Le “arti liberali” nei secoli XIII–XV,’ in L'Università di Siena: 750 anni di storia (Monte dei Paschi di Siena: Amilcare Pizzi Editore, 1991), pp. 255–60; and Paolo Nardi, L'Insegnamento superiore a siena nei secoli xi–xiv: Tentativi e realizzazioni dalle origini alla fondazione dello studio generale (Milan: Giuffrè Editore, 1996). 10 – Bowsky, Siena, pp. 96–101. 11 – Scholars have drawn the reasonable conclusion that Lorenzetti had help conceiving the frescoes, notwithstanding an inscription on the north wall that credits him alone (‘Ambrosius Laurentii de Senis hic pinxit utrinque’) and later characterizations of his intellectual stature in the writings of Ghiberti and Vasari. In referring at times to the frescoes as Lorenzetti's, I do not exclude the possibility that he worked with one or more learned advisors. Specific contributors are proposed by Rubinstein, ‘Political ideas,’ p. 189; and Joseph Polzer, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti's War and Peace murals revisited: Contributions to the meaning of the Good Government Allegory,’ Artibus et Historiae 23, no. 45 (2002), pp. 74–76. 12 – Rev. 9.7–10, cited in John Block Friedman, ‘Antichrist and the iconography of Dante's Geryon,’ Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972), p. 108–22. Examples in late medieval Italian art of the Eden serpent with a human face are discussed in Henry Ansgar Kelly, ‘The metamorphoses of the Eden serpent during the Middle Ages and Renaissance,’ Viator 2 (1971), pp. 301–27, here pp. 313, 318. 13 – Anat Tcherikover, ‘Reflections of the investiture controversy at Nonantola and Modena,’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 60, no. 2 (1997), pp. 158–65. For other depictions of duplicitous speech prior to Fraus, see Jesse M. Gellrich, ‘The art of the tongue: Illuminating speech and writing in later medieval manuscripts,’ in Virtue and Vice: The Personifications in the Index of Christian Art, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian Art, 2000), pp. 105–12. 14 – Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno, part I: Text, trans. Charles S. Singleton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 17. 7. 15 – Ibid., 17.15–18. Two early commentators on the poem, Guido of Pisa and Giovanni Boccaccio, remarked on the power of Geryon's skin to stimulate wonder. Guido of Pisa, Expositiones et Glose super Comediam Dantis, ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (New York: State University of New York Press, 1974), p. 311; and Giovanni Boccaccio, Il Commento di Giovanni Boccaccio sopra La Commedia, ed. Gaetano Milanesi (Florence: F. Le Monnier, 1863), p. 458. In the bestiary tradition, the stellio and the scitalis precede Geryon as reptilian deceivers with alluring skin: Isidore of Seville Etymologiarum (Migne PL 82.444, 82.447). A. R. Chisholm, ‘The prototype of Dante's Geryon,’ Modern Language Review 24 (1929), pp. 451–54, here p. 543, proposes the stellio–Geryon link. The scitalis has, to my knowledge, been overlooked in the copious literature on Geryon. 16 – Martianus Capella, The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, in Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, 2 vols., trans. William Harris Stahl, Richard Johnson, E.L. Burge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977) 5.426. I am grateful to Brigitte Buettner for suggesting to me that Fraus resembles medieval personifications of rhetoric. 17 – George Rowley, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), vol. 1, p. 106. 18 – Close variants appear in the pulpit carved by Giovanni Pisano for the cathedral in Pisa and in the relief decoration of the Campanile adjacent to the cathedral in Florence, probably carved by Andrea Pisano. See Paolo D'Ancona, ‘Le rappresentazioni allegoriche delle arti liberali nel medio evo e nel Rinascimento, III,’ L'Arte 5 (1902), pp. 211–28. 19 – Such a characterization of fraud has a parallel in theological writing of the time. Simone Fidati, a renowned Augustinian hermit who preached in Siena some time before his death in 1348, imagined the devil in Christ's time taking the form of a dignified man ‘of great skill and eloquence.’ Mary Germaine McNeil, Simone Fidati and his De Gestis Dominis Salvatoris (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1950), pp. 17, 91. Diana Norman discusses the possibility of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's familiarity with Fidati. Diana Norman, ‘“In the beginning was the word”: An altarpiece by Ambrogio Lorenzetti for the Augustinian Hermits of Massa Marittima,’ Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 58, no. 4 (1995), pp. 478–503, here p. 501. 20 – Latini, Tresor, v. 2.66.2. 21 – Chiara Frugoni seems to construe Fraus as female, while Diana Norman implies the figure to be male by describing it as ‘bearded.’ Chiara Frugoni, A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World, trans. William McCuaig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 154, 157; Diana Norman ‘“Love justice, you who judge the earth”: The paintings of the Sala dei Nove in the Palazzo Pubblico, Siena,’ in Siena, Florence and Padua: Art, Society and Religion, 1280–1400, ed. Diana Norman, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), vols. II, p. 152. Other scholars have characterized the figure in a gender-neutral way. On-site inspection with binoculars reveals no facial hair, though the paint of the face appears not to be fully intact and visible features resemble those of other men painted by Lorenzetti. 22 – Latini, Tresor, 2.66.3, 3.3.6. 23 – Roger Dragonetti, Le Mirage des sources: L'art du faux dans le roman médiéval (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1987), p. 50, interprets the ornaments of Capella's Rhetoric as figures of rhetoric constituting the finery of a style that beautifies writing. 24 – For styles of ornate speech, see Rhetorica ad Herennium (trans. Harry Caplan), 4.8.11. The formality of Fraus's gown decoration may correspond to the ‘grand’ style of oratory, which ‘consists of a smooth and ornate arrangement of impressive words.’ Campbell, The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano, 1290–1320 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 180, 182, has posited a relationship in late medieval Tuscany between rhetoric and multicolored clothing. 25 – Rhetorica ad Herennium, 4.13.19, 4.14.20–21, 4.15.21, 4.28.38–39. 26 – mulceo dum loquor, vario vestita colore. The gown's paint is now lost. Another pictorial link between paint and rhetoric occurs in a manuscript made in Prato in the late 1330s for Robert of Anjou (British Library, Royal MS 6 E IX, fol. 29), where a colorfully dressed Rhetoric is accompanied by the phrase, Pingo novos flores verbis variando colores (I paint new flowers with words by varying the colors). See Nicolas Bell, Music in Medieval Manuscripts (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), p. 9. 27 – Latini, Tresor, 3.10.3. Conscious associations between painting and rhetoric are usually ascribed to ancient and Renaissance writers, not to early fourteenth-century painters. See for instance David Summers, ‘Contrapposto: Style and meaning in Renaissance art,’ Art Bulletin, 59, no. 3 (Sept. 1977), pp. 336–61. 28 – ‘Emerald’ in its medieval usage applied to a range of hues, including a variety of precious and semi-precious stones of green color. See H.D. Austin, ‘Notes to the Divine Comedy (a supplement to existing commentaries),’ PMLA, 55, no. 3 (Sept. 1940), pp. 660–713, here p. 676. On the problem of medieval color terminology, see Michel Pastoureau, ‘Voir les couleurs au XIIIe siècle,’ Micrologus 6, pt. 2 (1998), pp. 147–65, here p. 148; and John Gage, Color and Meaning: Art, Science, Symbolism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 92–96. The right sleeve of Fraus is lighter than the material below it. The latter was repainted probably in 1492 due to moisture damage prior to the wall's reverse being enclosed in the palace. No one has doubted green to have been the original color. Donato judged restorations of the fresco to be accurate and to show enduring appreciation of Lorenzetti's art and its political message. Donato, ‘ “Bellissima inventiva”,’ p. 25, nn. 31–33. On the restorations, see Edna Carter Southard, The Frescoes in Siena's Palazzo Pubblico, 1289–1539: Studies in Imagery and Relations to Other Communal Palaces in Tuscany (New York: Garland, 1979), p. 273; and Alessandro Angelini, ‘I restauri di Pietro di Francesco agli affreschi di Ambrogio Lorenzetti nella “Sala della Pace”,’ Prospettiva, 31 (1982), pp. 78–82. 29 – The association of green and deceit may be familiar to historians of Renaissance art from the gown of the hybrid creature in the London Allegory painted around 1545 by Agnolo Bronzino. For this figure, see John F. Moffitt, ‘An exemplary humanist hybrid: Vasari's “Fraude” with reference to Bronzino's “Sphinx”,’ Renaissance Quarterly, 49 (1996), pp. 303–33. 30 – Anonymous, Libro de le virtudi de le pietre preziose, in Enrico Narducci, ‘Intorno a tre inediti volgarizzamenti del buon secolo della lingua,’ Il Propugnatore, 2, pt. 1 (1869), pp. 314–15. Albertus Magnus, the thirteenth-century Dominican scholar, wrote that the emerald dat verba persuasoria (confers persuasive speech). Beati Alberti Magni Opera Omnia, ed. Augusti Borgnet, 38 vols. (Paris: Vivès, 1890), V, pp. 45–46. 31 – L’Ottimo Commento della Divina Commedia, 2 vols (Pisa: Presso Niccolò Capurro, 1827), v. 555. 32 – Latini, Tresor, 2.1.3. 33 – John M. Riddle, ‘Lithotherapy in the Middle Ages: Lapidaries considered as medical texts,’ Pharmacy in History 12, no. 12 (1970), pp. 39–50, here pp. 47, 49. For the thirteenth-century scholastic writer William of Auvergne, the beauty of the color green was a function of its moderate physical effect on the eye. Unlike black and white, the extremes of the color scale between which green was situated in William's understanding, green the to See John Gage, in and Art History 1, no. 1 pp. here p. – For later associations between to speech and of green in see R. for in The of and in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 35 – Latini, Tresor, – Frugoni, A Distant pp. and Maria Monica Donato, del buon Le di Ambrogio in Palazzo in Pietro e Ambrogio Lorenzetti, ed. Chiara Frugoni (Florence: Le p. the of the figure, see Quentin Skinner, ‘Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Buon old new Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes pp. here pp. – Isidore of Seville Etymologiarum (Migne PL See also Le et dans (Paris: pp. discusses in late medieval 38 – Latini, Tresor, – Latini, Tresor, – in the sala dei in Arts of Power, pp. – Inferno, that fraud is more to it is to Latini, by and as of a that may the of and in the He judged to be more than on the that to be Latini, Tresor, – Rubinstein, ‘Political in Sienese The frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and di in the Palazzo Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 pp. and Skinner, old p. Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, pp. the discussion of what to the – Rhetorica ad Herennium, pp. In the case of an for the and of the of the – On the role of in the of Lorenzetti's frescoes and other paintings in fourteenth-century Italy, see ‘Notes on the and part Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 pp. here p. and painting and Word & Image no. 1 pp. here p. 45 – Scholars have other in which Lorenzetti's frescoes in the room of the Nine including the of and a of the and on the of Skinner, ‘The artist as political philosopher,’ p. Frugoni, A Distant p. and Donato, p. – e buon me e E in Simone p. – and Art and during the Renaissance University Press, 1985), pp. – A in and of the of was at times as a and I della della nella della 1987), p. 49 – Rhetorica ed. 3 vols vol. 2 p. – of Pisa, del ed. (Florence: 1992), p. – Ibid., pp. – are as he on who – The of from its to Siena, trans. and p. – De ad trans. John 2 vols (New York: Press, p. An of of the of the Augustinian Hermits in Siena a manuscript of De ad no. 2 pp. are in of See De has other between that and the frescoes, for instance Rubinstein, ‘Political ideas,’ p. and Skinner, old p. 6, For the of Lorenzetti's familiarity with Augustinian prior to the room of the Nine see Norman, ‘“In the pp. – pp. in the is that in the of the east wall fresco that has to be as of on the in a that of Fraus on the west wall, a with an The meaning of the is I that the central role of in the the in by Campbell's of the as on levels the of this it to notions of socially including the of painting C. Jean Campbell, The of Art and in the of Dante State University Press, pp. – Scholars have proposed that the painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the government’ fresco generally but have not to Frugoni, A Distant pp. Starn and Partridge, Arts of Power, pp. Donato, ‘ “Bellissima inventiva”,’ pp. and Fresken des Ambrogio Lorenzetti in della 16 (1997), pp. – The Italian Commune to Press, 1997), pp. – Bowsky, Siena, pp. 50, of the of was for after the a of taking each new in Siena was to it to a of the general William M. Bowsky, ‘The of in fourteenth-century Siena: to in and in Italian ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. here p. – Il del di Siena ed. Alessandro 2 vols di L. vol. – Ibid., – Ibid., and – Ibid., 1, 1, 2, The of Siena could question as well from and that not its Bowsky, Siena, p. – of fraud of the Nine were to be by the Bowsky, Siena, pp. – Ibid., Siena, p. – For and of see Siena and the Sienese in the University Press, 1991), pp. For see Bowsky, Siena, pp. – in rhetoric had been to Sienese men the In in to and to the and general for public in public and was to Siena to rhetoric and Nardi, p. is reasonable to that in and also what in the of Siena, p. – is discussed by Fioravanti, ‘Le “arti pp. and Nardi, pp. For Giovanni di the of the in that have been central to intellectual see rhetoric in Italy, Rhetorica 17, no. 3 1999), pp. here pp. of the of Herennium in comes in a that del on the in Prato around Robert and Society in and pp. here p. – John ‘The medieval and early Renaissance study of De and the Rhetorica ad and in The Rhetoric of in its Medieval and Early Renaissance and John pp. – de et La del del ed. (Florence: del 1998), pp. is in a on in Latini's man not to Latini also to the of speech. In one of he to words in that are and Latini, Tresor, discussion of speech that of pp. – Library, For discussion of this see Paul F. and The social meaning of study in Viator 25 pp. here pp. – e 72 – di del del to Latini's that a the of the one to you are speaking to to what you Latini including ‘good words and which the speech Latini, – Ibid., he his to words – An of this by Latini is speaking to the of his of and of his of the words to his audience from his against Ibid., Tresor, – Ibid., – Ibid., – Rhetorica ad Herennium, – pp. – may be in the of speech by and Brunetto Latini, in Latini's on the social of and in on to be that some of and on Herennium to the of the by Christian to the possibility of in Two are di of the and the in and from to be on an audience to to be and in pp. – in the volgare: A fourteenth-century and its in Rhetoric and in the in of John ed. J. J. and M. pp. here p. – Skinner, ‘Ambrogio p. that the paintings the of a to the Nove of the were to of the general would have to judge by observation that with the in around men the of in the would have made it for to to Bowsky, Siena, p. 100. – An of the role of wall paintings in late medieval for a to is the of to in and pp. to p. and of Herennium were generally in in the by the – Bowsky, Siena, p. –

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