Featured Graduate Student Research: Danny Smith

Danny Smith is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Art and Art History where his research focuses on depictions of architecture and the development of linear perspective in late-medieval Italian painting. With the support of a research grant from The Europe Center, he traveled to Italy in the sweltering summer of 2017 to research Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s 1338 fresco cycle of the Effects of Good and Bad Government, in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena.

In Siena his research focused on the cycle itself – a tripartite sequence of allegorical paintings commissioned to decorate the audience chamber of The Nine, the democratically elected body who ruled Siena from 1287-1355. The frescoes depict two opposing scenes: in one, a depiction of the effects of good government, an idealized city bustles and farmers till a fertile countryside; in the other, a parable of the effects of bad government, a city is ruinous and crime-ridden and neighboring fields lie fallow. Between the two scenes a third panel depicts a council of good governors: personifications of virtues and a panoply of allegorical figures. Danny’s research focused in particular on the prominence of windows and carefully constructed vistas within the two depicted cities to underscore a uniquely political message embedded within the frescos to the government of Siena: that just as they could observe the citizens they governed, they too were subject to the gazes of the people. Commissioned barely a decade after the Sienese constitution had been translated into vulgate Italian and was widely read among citizens for the first time, this visual emphasis reflected a largely unprecedented interest, by the citizens of Siena, in observing and even supervising the workings of their government.

Danny’s research took him further afield then expected – following the tip of an archivist at Siena’s Archivio di Stato, he traveled to the city of Assisi, where Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s brother painted a cycle of the life of Christ in which the suicide of Judas is rendered in strikingly similar terms to an allegorical figure of Security punishing a wrong-doer in the Siena frescoes. Excitingly, this comparison, as well as city records from the period found in Siena’s Archivio, has blown his project wide open, shifting his focus from purely a study of secular imagery in Siena to a larger project about the role of the church and religious imagery in Sienese city planning under the secular rule of The Nine. This research will be presented in May at the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI as well in a forthcoming chapter in an edited volume on sensory experience in the Middle Ages.