LORENZETTI, AMBROGIO
**Peace.** Fresco in the Palazzo della Signoria with the Good Government and the Bad Government — Siena, Palazzo Comunale.
Through the power of synthesis in his outlines, a Florentine echo is again discernible in his great fresco compositions: the Franciscan scenes in Siena and the allegorical cycle of the Good Government, which was the artist’s most extensive pictorial undertaking. The complicated symbolic and doctrinal scaffolding of these famous compositions does not diminish their representative efficacy but becomes itself a subject of poetry, from which the cycle derives its exceptional importance, both historical and documentary.
Yet it is above all in certain panel paintings, such as the *Madonna del Latte* and the *Maestà of Massa*, that the most personal characteristics of Ambrogio’s technique and inspiration emerge with greater intensity and elevation: the sense of absorbed, superhuman calm that pervades and is reflected, with a touch of sensual languor, in the lush and opulent ideal of feminine beauty he cherished; the ability to perceive the most hidden and delicate movements of the heart and to represent them in the tender, passionate intimacy of his Madonnas and Christ Childs; and the refined, subtle sensitivity to color, which he rendered warm and luminous. Of these qualities, the late *Annunciation* of 1344 is a striking testament, perhaps unique in all of European painting of the 14th century.
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It is probable, though not certain, that a payment recorded on 25 February 1306 refers to him, after which one must come to 1320, when Guido Tarlati, Bishop of Arezzo, commissioned a polyptych for the parish church of Santa Maria — a work still signed *in situ*. In 1324 he painted shields for the Captain of the People in Siena, and in 1326 some *Histories* in the Opera del Duomo house, now lost; also lost or unidentified is a panel of 1329 for the church of the Humiliati. From 1329 comes the large altarpiece for the Carmelite convent of Siena, dismembered in 1818; its central composition (*Madonna and Child, four Angels, St Nicholas and the Prophet Elijah*) survives, along with the entire predella depicting five scenes from the Carmelite Order, originally from the church of Sant’Ansano at Dofana, now in the Pinacoteca of Siena, together with other minor fragments. Records of smaller works for the Commune and the Opera del Duomo of Siena date from 1329, 1330 and 1333.
In 1335, having completed together with his brother Ambrogio the frescoed *Histories of the Virgin* on the façade of the Hospital of Santa Maria della Scala (destroyed in 1720), he began the altarpiece for the altar of San Savino in Siena Cathedral: its central panel, the *Nativity of the Virgin*, dated 1342, is now in the Museo dell’Opera di Siena, while two panels that Pietro had agreed to paint for Paolo di Tingo in 1340 are lost. However, dated 1340 and bearing the painter’s signature is the *Madonna and Child with Angels* in the Uffizi (no. 445), from the church of San Francesco in Pistoia. Documents relating to licenses granted him extend from 1337 to 1345; the absence of further notices leads to the presumption that he died in the plague of 1348.
Among works not documented but of undisputed attribution to Pietro are: a *Madonna and Child with Four Angels*, once in the Duomo and now in the Museo d’Arte Sacra in Cortona, chronologically prior to the Arezzo Polyptych; a painted Crucifix in the church of San Marco in Cortona; a small signed diptych (*Madonna and Ecce Homo*) in the Lindenau Museum, Altenburg; a *Madonna* in the parish church of Castiglion d’Orcia; another in that of Monticchiello in the Sienese countryside; and one in the Perkins Collection at Lastra a Signa; a frescoed *Crucifixion* in the church of San Francesco in Siena, from the Chapter; a *Saint Lucy* in the church of Santa Lucia de’ Magnoli in Florence; and various other panels in the Pinacoteca of Siena, including an incomplete polyptych dated 1332 (nos. 79–81–82), as well as works in public galleries and private collections in Italy and abroad. Finally, a cycle of frescoes in the Lower Basilica of San Francesco in Assisi, comprising the *Histories of the Passion* and two *Madonnas with Saints*, is judged among his most important creations. More controversial is the attribution of the polyptych with *Blessed Humility and Scenes from her Legend* in the Uffizi (no. 8347).
Pietro’s temperament and stylistic formation differed greatly from those of his brother Ambrogio. In Siena he introduced a sober and vigorous narrative style, rich in immediacy and dramatic potential, so that from the usual themes of Christian iconography he brought to the fore especially the tragic element. Giovanni Pisano’s sculpture inspired motifs of great pathetic force and profound religious and human resonance — the best known being the silent, sorrowful exchange of glances that tenderly binds the Madonna to the Child in various panel and fresco representations (at Cortona, Arezzo, Assisi and Florence). In small-format compositions, such as the predella of the Carmelite altarpiece in Siena, his painting displays a truly precious and exquisite minuteness, yet it achieved perhaps even more original and effective results in the broad technique of fresco. The mutilated *Crucifixion* in San Francesco in Siena and the stupendous *Passion* cycle in Assisi — probably executed over time with assistants, especially for the *Deposition* and the grand *Crucifixion*, reminiscent of the sublime one in Duccio’s *Maestà* — rank among the highest visual expressions of the dramatic genius of 14th-century Italy. — *See pl. CV.*