‘I Dialoghi di San Giorgio’//Atmospheres for freedom

This theme was chosen on the
basis of a series of considerations prompted by an aesthetic
experience. On a wall in the Sala dei Nove of the Palazzo Pubblico in
Siena, a celebrated fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti depicts the ‘principles’ of good government, which is to say, the leading
players (government and justice) and the fundamental virtues for the
‘good’ exercise of power (faith, hope, charity, wisdom, harmony,
strength and equilibrium). On a second wall in the same room, another
fresco describes the ‘effects’ of good government.

Observing these frescoes conveys a sense of order, peace, security,
serenity and prosperity. Yet Lorenzetti’s cycle goes further,
concluding with the ‘allegory and effects’ of ‘bad government‘,
which represents an idea of ‘tyranny’ or of a government that
privileges its own limited and vested interests over those of the
common good. The tyrant, counselled by the seven ‘vices’, attains this
sordid result by thwarting ‘justice’, portrayed as bound and stripped
of every prerogative. The city and the countryside are devastated,
reduced to scenes of oppression and violence, a stage for death and
destruction in which no one works and the only one to prosper is the
blacksmith, who continues his lethal production of arms.
Politicians, philosophers and social scientists have long debated the
ideal conditions for a working democracy. Most of their attention,
however, has focused on laws, constitutions and electoral methods, or,
in a word, on ‘procedures’. Very little consideration has been given to
analysing an ‘ecology’ that renders the institutional forms of democracy ‘livable’, or to the ‘atmosphere’,
so effectively represented in Lorenzetti’s fresco, in which good or bad
government influences, and is influenced by, every aspect of the social
landscape from household economics to agriculture, from commerce to the
various forms of social life.