Effects of Good Government in the countryside

The Sala della Pace (“Peace Room”) is covered with frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti (1338-1339), commissioned by the council of the Nine and one of the most important secular cycles in the history of art, a true civil and political manifesto of Siena’s enlightened and ambitious government. The effects of good government are illustrated on the adjoining wall, which faces, and opposes, the Bad Government wall. Peasants enter with their mules laden with goods to sell, sacks of flour and wool, and hens, firewood, even a pig. A shepherd is walking out with his flock, and a party of well-dressed noblemen on horseback has already gone past the walls, headed for the open country for a picnic or to hunt. In the countryside, where the air is clear and the atmosphere serene and relaxed, people are working in the fields, planting, harvesting, tending the orderly vineyards next to the farmhouses. The view widens to sweep over the hills to the distant horizon, demonstrating the vastness of the possessions of the Republic of Siena, protected from above by a large winged figure, Securitas, under whose vigilant eye “every man” can walk “without fear.”