454 Lorris, William de (Guillaume de)
Cycle in the Lower Church of San Francesco at ASSISI.
His later accomplishment can seen in signed and dated
paintings for a parish church in Arezzo done from 1320
to 1323 for the Carmelites of Siena and completed in
1329, and in Duomo of Siena between 1335 and 1342.
Much of his other work in fresco has been lost.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Ambrogio was probably the younger and was recognized
for his use of perspective in the depiction of pictorial
space and for his interest in classical art. The first part of
Ambrogio’s career occurred in Florence. Lorenzo GHIB-
ERTI, in his mid-15th-century Commentaries, praised
Ambrogio and rated him higher than another famous
and contemporary Sienese painter, Simone MARTINI.
Ambrogio became the Sienese regime’s official painter
after Simone Martini’s departure for AVIGNONin about
- His sophisticated fresco decoration of a meeting
room in the town hall of Siena from 1338 to 1339 was
the first large landscape painting since antiquity. It
included a remarkable townscape of Siena, a panoramic
and detailed rural landscape, and complex allegorical
representations of good and bad government and their
effects on a society and urban community. It has been
used as an important and complex source for under-
standing communal political theory in late-medieval
Italy. Ambrogio and Pietro both probably died in the
plague of 1348.
See also ART AND ARCHITECTURE,GOTHIC; FRESCO
PAINTING.
Further reading:Bruce Cole, Sienese Painting, from
Its Origins to the Fifteenth Century(New York: Harper &
Row, 1980); Chiara Frugoni, Pietro and Ambrogio Loren-
zetti(New York: Harper & Row, 1988); Hayden B. J. Mag-
innis, Painting in the Age of Giotto: A Historical
Reevaluation(University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State
University, 1997); George Rowley, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 2
vols. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958);
Randolph Starn, Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Palazzo Pub-
blico, Siena(New York: George Braziller, 1994).Lorris, William de (Guillaume de) See ROMAN DE LA
ROSE.Louis I the Pious (778–840)youngest son of Charle-
magne, emperor
Louis was the son of CHARLEMAGNEand his third wife,
Hildegard (d. 783), and was born near Poitiers in 778. He
was made king of AQUITAINEand was consecrated for that
position by Pope Hadrian I (r. 772–795) in 781. In 813,
after the death of his two elder brothers, his father
decided he should inherit the imperial Crown. On Jan-
uary 28, 814, Charlemagne died and with that the expan-
sionist phase of the Carolingian Empire ended. After
attempting secular and monastic reforms within the
church at the great councils of 817 and 818, Louis tried
to settle the succession of the empire in 817. His eldest
son, Lothair (795–855), became his coemperor; his sec-
ond son, Pépin (797–838), became the king of Aquitaine;
and the youngest son, Louis the German (805–876), the
king of BAVARIA. In the early years of his reign, he suc-
cessfully reformed the administration of the empire and
strengthened its ties with the PAPACY.Ambrogio Lorenzetti, The Effects of Good Government on the City from hisAllegory of Good Government, frescos (1338–39) in
the Town Hall (Palazzo Pubblico), Siena, Italy (Scala / Art Resource)