Alexandria for an Augustinian chapter house formerly
adjacent to the church. The Maestà depicts Mary and
Christ adored by saints who bear the attributes of their
faith; these include some who were brutally martyred:
Saint Bartholemew with his fl ayed skin, Saint Agatha
with her breasts, and Saint Catherine with her severed
head all kneel and present their tokens of faith to the
child. This grisly spectacle strikes terror into the child,
who staggers unsteadily backward in an attempt to es-
cape—the most natural response a child could have.
Some of Ambrogio’s patrons apparently felt that his
daringly human interpretation of the divine breached
the limits of decorum. The chapel of Monte Siepi in
the rural abbey of San Galgano near Siena was built
to honor this Sienese saint and to commemorate a vi-
sion of the Madonna that Galgano had on this site. The
surviving frescoes are fragmentary; but Ambrogio’s
original program for the chapel, c. 1336, included a
depiction of Galgano’s vision, portraying a procession
of saints and angels on the side walls converging, along
with the visitors inside the chapel, toward the Madonna
enthroned as queen of heaven on the wall behind the
altar. By portraying saints on the walls fl anking the en-
throned Madonna, Ambrogio involved the entire space
of the chapel, surrounding the viewer with Galgano’s
vision—a bold experiment that anticipates the carefully
coordinated chapel interiors of the seventeenth century.
The complex iconographic program for the wall por-
trayed the Virgin’s central role in the mystery of human
redemption: she was shown both as the exalted queen of
heaven at the top of the fresco and as the humble Virgin
Annunciate at the bottom. As the discovery (in 1996) of
the sinopie underlying the frescoes revealed, Ambrogio
originally portrayed the Virgin of the annunciation cow-
ering in utter terror before the angel, while the Maestà
above showed her enthroned without the child, wearing
a crown, and bearing worldly symbols of power—the
orb and scepter—in her hands. Both of these unique
images were suppressed shortly after completion of the
frescoes: the trembling annunciate was painted over by
another artist, who replaced her with a typical meekly
accepting Madonna; and the empress was transformed
into the more usual image of motherhood by placing
the Christ child on her lap. Presumably, the patrons had
been disturbed by Ambrogio’s provocative interpreta-
tions and had subsequently commissioned something
more conventional.
From 1337 to 1340, under commission from Siena’s
ruling Council of Nine, Ambrogio worked on the most
important surviving cycle of medieval secular decora-
tions, the Allegory and Effects of Good and Bad Gov-
ernment, painted on three walls of the Sala della Pace
(or Sala dei Nove), one of the ruling council’s meeting
rooms in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena. This cycle
is almost completely devoid of religious content; its
complex philosophical underpinnings—along the lines
of antique Aristotelian, Ciceronian, or more strictly me-
dieval tracts—are still disputed. We may take comfort in
the fact that even during the Trecento, visitors to the sala
needed the learned interpretation of a guide in order to
understand the extremely intricate allegorical message
of the cycle. The fresco juxtaposes the elements of just
and harmonious rule with the evil elements of tyranny,
contrasting the effects of each form of rule on city and
country. The mural is fi lled with visual puns (Harmony,
for instance, is shown with a wood plane, smoothing
out any unevenness) and references to the antique (the
fi gure of Peace is derived from an antique Roman coin).
In his depiction of the prosperous city, Ambrogio cre-
ated an unparalleled catalog of the myriad activities
of town life. Nothing else in medieval art prepares us
for the panoramic landscape adjacent to the well-gov-
erned city, which is the fi rst landscape since antiquity,
and really the fi rst “portrait” of a particular terrain—a
glance out the window of this hall reveals the close
affi nity between the fresco and the Tuscan countryside
surrounding Siena.
As noted above, Ambrogio collaborated with Pietro
on (lost) frescoes for a hospital in Siena, and on frescoes
for a Franciscan chapter house (the latter included a
painting of a typhoon, since lost, that Ghiberti praised
highly). Ambrogio also painted an altarpiece of the
Presentation at the Temple and Purifi cation of Mary
(1342; Florence, Uffi zi) for the same cycle in the ca-
thedral at Siena for which Pietro executed his Birth of
the Virgin. Like Pietro’s work, Ambrogio’s Presentation
is startling for its sophisticated suggestion of space and
light. Ambrogio’s last signed and dated work is from
1344: an Annunciation (Siena, Pinacoteca) painted for
the chamber of the tax magistrate in the Palazzo Pub-
blico in Siena. The moment of incarnation depicted here
presents an interpretation of great theological subtlety,
and the spatial construction of the panel shows the tile
fl oor converging to a single vanishing point; this is the
closest any Trecento painting comes to true one-point
perspective.
Ambrogio and Pietro both evidently died of the
plague in 1348; with their deaths, Siena’s period of
cultural ascendancy came to an end.
See also Duccio di Buoninsegna; Martini, SimoneFurther Reading
Borsook, Eve. Ambrogio Lorenzetti. Florence: Sadea Sansoni,
1966.
Brandi, Cesare. Pietro Lorenzetti: Affreschi nella basilica infe-
riore di Assisi. Rome: Pirelli, 1957.
——. Pietro Lorenzetti. Rome: Edizioni Mediteranee, 1958.
Carli, Enzo. Pietro Lorenzetti. Milan: A. Martello, 1956.
——. I Lorenzetti. Milan: Fabbri, 1965.
——. La pittura senese del Trecento. Milan: Electa, 1981.LORENZETTI, PIETRO AND AMBROGIO