The
World Pope Francis Advocates Already Exists: It’s Called Tuscany
143. Together with the patrimony of
nature, there is also an historic, artistic and cultural patrimony which is
likewise under threat. This patrimony is a part of the shared identity of each
place and a foundation upon which to build a habitable city. It is not a matter
of tearing down and building new cities, supposedly more respectful of the
environment yet not always more attractive to live in. Rather, there is a need
to incorporate the history, culture and architecture of each place, thus
preserving its original identity. Ecology, then, also involves protecting the
cultural treasures of humanity in the broadest sense.
Encyclical Letter Laudato Si’ Of The Holy Father Francis,
18 June 2015
p. 42
156. Human ecology is inseparable
from the notion of the common good, a central and unifying principle of social
ethics. The common good is “the sum of those conditions of social life which
allow social groups and their individual members relatively thorough and ready
access to their own fulfilment”.[122]
pp. 45-6
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| View of Siena from the south |
With
the release of Pope Francis’ encyclical on the environment it might be said
that there is no longer any excuse of ignorance for ignoring our common home.
It should also be borne in mind, though, that the situation he fears and the
future he hopes for are equally evident already on the planet—the former in so
many places built in the last century and a half, the latter in the world we
inherited from before. Where that older world has not been destroyed, even if
only preserved and not augmented, a vision of what the world could be is
available, tangible, and accessible.
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| The Virtues of the well-governed city on the left, and their effects on city and countryside on the right |
The
common good was painted in Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s fresco of the Allegory of Good and Bad Government in
the Siena town hall as the “ruler” of the well-governed city. As the city in
the fresco is understood to represent the real city outside, so too is the harmonious
and fertile frescoed landscape meant to be continuous with the real landscape
outside the room’s only window. This is how I summed it up in my book Timeless
Cities:
"Lorenzetti’s attention to detail and the
rich complexity of life he shows must have made his fresco seem very “real” to
his fourteenth century audience; he also, consciously, wrote the inscription
carried by Securitas in Tuscan rather than Latin, to make it accessible to a
wider public. The real world is also intertwined with the allegorical world in
the Good and Bad Government tableau
by frescoing only three walls of the Room of the Nine, leaving the fourth,
exterior wall (flanked in the corners by the extensions of good government of
the city into the painted countryside) open through its large windows to the
real Sienese landscape beyond, thereby blurring the distinction between
illusion and actuality: just as the real city of Siena is alluded to in the
image of the well-governed city by the way one enters the room, so too the
well-governed contado is extended
from the fresco out through the room’s real windows to the landscape beyond. Here,
by means of this single simple leap from the fictive landscape of the painting
to the real Sienese countryside available outside the window, practical
politics (the actual “good” Government of the Nine which takes place daily in
the room) ideally merges with the painted allegorical Virtues (the figures
surrounding the good governor) and the sacred realm (in the form of the mater misericordia frescoed in the
preceding room and embodied in the very shape of the piazza outside) in a
complex sequence of scenes which iconographically convey many potential
symbolic readings simultaneously, while their novel realism speaks directly to
the humblest petitioner. As a work of art the fresco is almost inexhaustible in
its possible levels of a appreciation. As a moral message it is both a promise
to the citizens and an admonishment to their leaders. As an architectural ideal
it both sums up and spurs an urban vision that would receive additional
fleshing out over the next three centuries."
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| Looking south from the campanile of the Palazzo Pubblico |
Siena
and its landscape remain humane, beautiful, and sustainable. It has been a
choice to preserve them, but the fact that they exist means we can also choose to
make them again, wherever there is the will.
