Image source: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain). View source
Effects of Good Government in the Countryside
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Renaissance & Mannerism
- Artist
- Ambrogio Lorenzetti (c. 1290–1348)
- Date
- 1338–1339
- Dimensions
- Part of a fresco cycle about 14 m wide
- Medium
- Fresco
- Location
- Sala dei Nove, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena, Italy
This fresco shows the rolling countryside outside the walls of Siena under good government: peasants plough, sow and harvest, travellers and merchants ride safely along the roads, and nobles set out to hunt with falcons, all in a landscape of fields, vineyards and farmhouses.
A closer look
The scene is part of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government, painted for the room where the Nine, the city's ruling council, met. One wall shows the virtues of a just government, another the miseries caused by tyranny, and this wall the happy effects of good rule in the city and the countryside. Above the landscape floats a winged figure of Security, holding a scroll that promises that everyone may travel without fear, and a gallows as a warning to criminals. It is one of the first true landscape paintings in Western art since antiquity.