Michael Wood on lessons on good government from medieval Siena

Siena is one of the great historic cities – a living vision of the medieval world found now in very few places. Here is the architecture and street plan of a medieval city-state, the oldest bank in the world, and one of the oldest universities. Siena was even the first place to ban the car, in 1966! In its centre, the great square called the Campo hosts the famous Palio horse race twice a year. It’s a place to relish the continuance of the past into the present.

In the Middle Ages, Siena was run by the Nine, who rotated every two months as a bulwark against tyranny. They met in the council hall in the Palazzo Pubblico (Public Palace) on the Campo. On the first floor is a room adorned with some of the most extraordinary paintings in western art. Three fresco panels, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338, offer a vibrant vision of life in town and country on the eve of the Black Death. This huge work, known as The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, covers three walls. In the dim light, the eyes need a moment to take in the scale and the colour – the deep, luminous ultramarine skies created with a paint made from ground lapis lazuli. It’s the last great creation of the school of painting in Siena that came to an abrupt end when the plague struck Italy in 1348, killing half the city’s population – including Lorenzetti and his elder brother, Pietro.

These extraordinary frescoes came to mind while visiting the National Gallery’s fabulous Siena exhibition this summer. The focus there was on four painters: Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzettis. It encapsulated an exquisite, idiosyncratic moment, with none of the advances of Renaissance art: perspective, anatomy, realism. Instead, as the cultural historian Erin Maglaque eloquently remarks, we saw “silk, gold, and suspended emotion – an embrace of mystery that feels archaic and alien”.

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Florence lies close by, but the Sienese were seduced by the solemn power of Byzantine art. (“It was certainly mean-spirited of the Sienese to persist in being purely medieval right through the Renaissance,” wrote one Victorian critic!) The effect is spine-tingling, dominated not by the ideal landscapes of Florentine or Venetian art but by gold – crusted, layered, stamped; gold revealed by scraping away paint so it seems to flicker below the surface. It’s a secret, enclosed world of ornate chapels and churches in towering streets heavy with sun, the burnt red-earth colour of the landscape.

Which brings me back to 1338 and Ambrogio Lorenzetti, executing his stupendous frescoes. That year was fraught, the city in a state of emergency. The threat of authoritarian rule by one man was rising, undermining the idea of the common good. The painting, remember, enfolds the room in which the Nine met to run the city: Lorenzetti was reminding them of just how much was at stake. What constitutes good governance? And its opposite?

In The Allegory of Good Government – one of six scenes in Lorenzetti’s frescoes – we see the commune of Siena, magistrates and officers linked by the woven cords of community and justice that bind them. Above them is the guiding figure of Wisdom, with the virtues of good government personified: Peace, Fortitude, Prudence, Magnanimity and Temperance. We see the city at peace: tradesmen, shopkeepers, wedding processions, music and dancing – all the good things that civilisation brings. Another section provides a bird’s-eye view of the fecund Tuscan countryside, with an inscription: “When justice is sovereign, the wicked are stripped of all power.”

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There is also The Effects of Bad Government, dominated by a horned demon who embodies Tyranny. Below him, the figure of Justice lies bound with allegorical figures of Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division and War. Above Tyranny float Avarice and Pride, enemies of humanity. Once humming with life, in this scene the town lies in ruins, houses demolished, shops and workshops closed except for armourers, the arms dealers of their day. Armies advance on each other: we see looting, murder, rape, abuse of women – a Guernica of the 14th century.

Thinking of these images, I was reminded of our own era of disasters and injustice, and of the challenges to the rule of law in the US. In Siena, Lorenzetti asked the council to “Turn your eyes to behold her, you who are governing, who is portrayed here: Justice, crowned on account of her excellence, who always renders to everyone his due. Look how many goods derive from her, and how sweet and peaceful is that life of the city where is preserved this virtue who outshines any other.”

This article was first published in the August 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine