The city's new clothes: Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the poetics of peace

C. Jean Campbell

The pain that nevertheless remains bears witness to ... the experience of having been able to exist for, through, with another mind. When one dreams of a happy, harmonious, utopian society, one imagines it built on love, since love exalts me at the same time as it exceeds or overtaxes me. Yet far from amounting to an understanding, passionate love can be equated less with the calm slumber of reconciled civilizations than with their delirium, disengagement and breach. A fragile crest where death and regeneration vie for dominance.--Julia Kristeva, "In Praise of Love" (1)

Near the beginning of his Tesoretto (ca. 1260-66) Brunetto Latini, the Florentine notary who is best known to modem readers as Dante's schoolmaster from the circle of sodomites in Inferno (canto 15), provided an explanation for the dream journey that makes up the remainder of his little poem. In the relevant passage Brunetto describes his response to the news, conveyed to him by a scholar whom he encounters on his way home from an embassy to Castile, of the defeat of the Florentine Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti. For Brunetto, as a member of the defeated faction, this entails exile from his native Florence. Taking stock of his situation the poet "returns," as he says, to "the nature" he has heard is "possessed by every man coming into the world." In the lines that immediately follow Brunetto, in describing the divisions that occur with birth, articulates the order of filiation, to father, family, and state, ending with a declaration that is familiar to students of Ambrogio Lorenzetti's great fresco cycle for the Sala dei Nove (1338-40) in the Palazzo Pubblico of Siena: "All in common should pull together on a rope of peace and welfare, because a land torn apart cannot survive." (2) In the Sienese frescoes Brunetto's words are translated in and around the personification of concordia, who, in a visual enactment of her name, joins together the two cords she receives from the scales of Justice and then delivers the resulting rope to a line of citizens (Fig. 1). The citizens in turn pull together on that rope, which, at its other end, binds the wrist of the personification of Siena's sovereignty.

Brunetto Latini was a civic rhetorician and one of the great compilers of human knowledge in communal Italy. His most ambitious work, Li livres dou tresor (ca. 1260-65), includes, in three books, an encyclopedia of the natural world, a treatise on the virtues and vices, and a discussion of the uses of rhetoric in civic government, concluding with a section that explicitly associates rhetoric and ethics. (3) This last book of the treatise has been read by students of the Sienese frescoes as a manual for communal government, a manual in which Brunetto advocates the ideal of republican government that is represented in the frescoes. (4) Quentin Skinner has argued that the relation between Brunetto's writings and the Sienese frescoes, clearly visible, for example, in the representation of concordia, constitutes evidence of the prehumanistic and predominantly Ciceronian ideas that stand behind their imagery. Whether or not we accept all the particulars of Skinner's conclusions, some of which have been disputed by proponents of the specifically Thomistic-Aristotelian interpretation of the frescoes first put forward by Nicolai Rubinstein in 1958, (5) his contribution to the study of the frescoes is important because it brings to light the prehumanistic culture of civility that had flourished in the communes of central Italy since the twelfth century. This culture was given voice in the writings of Brunetto Latini and a complex visual interpretation by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the frescoes of the Sala dei Nove, the executive council chamber of Siena's city hall (Fig. 2). Particularly relevant here is Skinner's explication of the value, promoted in the writings of the dictatores (civic rhetoricians), of actively bringing forth peace "into the center of things," an idea that was visually translated by Ambrogio in the placement of the personification of peace in medium (at the midpoint) between the figure of Justice and the representation of Siena's sovereignty (Fig. 3). Equally important is Skinner's observation that Ambrogi o represented Peace, following the tradition of the dictatores, not simply as the absence of discord but rather as an active agent of the goal she represents. Peace appears accordingly in the Sienese frescoes as a seductive Venus-like figure, reclining on a suit of armor. (6)

For Brunetto, a real commonwealth in nature is replaced after birth by a series of social allegiances on the one hand, and a desire for a peaceful communal society on the other, a desire that is reignited by the circumstance of his exile and the divisions that it makes so vivid to him. (9) The healing of those divisions is made possible, on the one hand, by a fiction of human government in which concord represents the binding force and, on the other hand, by the poetic remembrance of nature as a common possession, a process that Brunetto figures as the imaginary journey through nature's realm, which takes up the remainder of the poem. This journey constitutes a vital part of Brunetto's representation of commonwealth. Without the poetic remembrance of the reality of nature, the fiction of concord is hollow and the commonwealth remains a bloodless ideal.

In all the discussion of the importance of Brunetto's writings for the understanding of the foundations of republican government as they are represented in Arnbrogio's frescoes, relatively little attention has been paid either to what Brunetto identifies, at the beginning of the Tesoretto, as the real source of commonwealth or to the significance of his explanation for the interpretation of this famous Sienese fresco cycle. Skinner alludes to an answer, founded in the relation between peace and nature, when he refers to Seneca's description of "'that fortunate time when the benefits of nature lay open in medio'--in such a way as to be possessed by all (Epistolae Morales 90.36)." (7) The answer is given far more explicitly in the Tesorett o, where Brunetto abbreviated the material of his Tresor and collapsed the three books of the encyclopedic work into a poetic journey to the realm of nature, the goal of which was the ethical education of the citizen. (8)

The appearance, in Ambrogio's frescoes, of Lady Concordia therefore begs the questions if and how a corresponding remembrance of a lost nature is also constituted in the paintings. My contention is that the group of dancers at the heart of Ambrogio's peaceful cityscape--a figure that has already been associated in the literature with such abstract ideas as concord, social harmony, love, and peace. (10) -- conjures a notion of love whose source is precisely that common nature of which Brunetto speaks (Fig. 4). Infinitely fragmented but nonetheless real, that nature can only be remembered poetically, as an experience akin to that described by Julia Kristeva in the above-quoted passage as "A fragile crest where death and regeneration vie for dominance."

While invoking Kristeva, and thereby also the psychoanalytic and poetic terms of her project, I intend not to abandon the historical enterprise but to expand it to embrace the question of experience. I must say at the outset that it is not my primary goal to present new historical evidence for the interpretation of the Sienese frescoes. In fact, many of the materials that are relevant to the present discussion have already been assembled around the frescoes. Nor do I reject the prevailing historical interpretations of the fresco cycle as constituting, both in the figure of the dancers and as a whole, a representation of the peaceful commonwealth. In fact, I hope to provide support for the idea that peace--most obviously represented by Ambrogio in the figure of the reclining nymph at the center of the diagrammatic portion of the fresco cycle (Fig. 1)--is the central element of the complex and vital notion of commonwealth that is represented in the frescoes. (11) What I have to offer is an interpretation that e mbraces the fullness of the metaphor constituted in the figure of the dancers, a metaphor that encompasses not just an idea but also an experience of peace.

Let me begin by rehearsing the state of the question regarding the dancers as part of the imagery of peace, and particularly the problem of their dress as it concerns that issue. The dance itself has been assimilated, relatively easily, to the idea of peace and harmony that the image of the ideal city has been taken to represent. Jack Greenstein, for instance, observed that the dancers' "stately demeanor and ordered actions" seem to be reined in by the influence of the celestial Venus, who appears personified in the upper border of the fresco over the cityscape. (12) The costumes, however, have proven more difficult to accommodate as part of such a chaste and dignified image of peace. If anything, they appear to have been orchestrated by the terrestrial Venus.

As Jane Bridgeman and others have observed, the elaborately decorated costumes--some parti-color, others historiated, one with slashed sleeves, and all with fringed hems and with what by contemporary standards would have been considered daring decolletage--constitute a veritable catalogue of extravagant dress as described and proscribed by contemporary Sienese sumptuary legislation. (13) In a general sense all of the dresses call to mind the words of a Sienese statute of 1330 banning elaborately decorated, inscribed, and/or historiated costumes. (14) The law specifically prohibited the decoration of clothing with painted, embroidered, woven, applied, or otherwise affixed images of trees, fruits, flowers, and foliage, or with any kind of animal imagery. (15) In fourteenth-century terminology, the Sienese dancers might be said to be dressed alla ninfa (as maidens): which is to say, in ornate, quasitheatrical, capriciously decorated, and effeminate garb. (16) In a civil context, such dress was considered blamewo rthy for its luxury and specifically because it obscured or subverted all sorts of important social distinctions, including both gender and class.

While such costumes were generally proscribed for upstanding citizenry, they were closely associated with the itinerant entertainers variously designated in the documents as istriones, giocolatori, giullari, and menestrelli. (17) More tellingly for the present case, they also belonged to the type of dress associated with the bands, or brigate, of youths and maidens whose activities were the focus of festive springtime rituals in communal Tuscany. In fact, the remarkable imagery decorating the dresses of Ambrogio's dancers, particularly the caterpillars and dragonflies on the dresses of the two centrally located dancers (Fig. 6), points to this ephemeral species of attire. Unlike most of the other animal patterns we know from historiated textiles--griffins, lions, or parrots, for example--caterpillars, in particular, do not offer a very good basis for the kind of bilaterally symmetrical, positive-negative repetitive patterning that lent itself to the medium of weaving. (18) This suggests, especially in the cas e of the dress emblazoned with caterpillars, that the reference may be to a painted, embroidered, or otherwise affixed pattern rather than to a woven one, an allusion that would be consistent with the notion that the dancers' apparel refers to the realm of costume and festivity, not to that of everyday life. (19)

Records in contemporary chronicles of the types of celebrations in which such clothing might have appeared are numerous. Giovanni Villani, the great Florentine chronicler of the fourteenth century, remembered several such rituals in the pages of his Cronica (ca. 1300-1348). He offered the following description of the celebration of the rites of May in 1289:

And each year on the calends of May, to express the happiness and well-being of the city, brigate and companies of noble youths dressed in new clothes [vestiti di nuovo] would gather, making courts covered with banners and veils of silk, and wooden enclosures in various parts of the city. Similar [companies] of ladies and maidens, wearing garlands of flowers on their heads, and playing musical instruments, would gather and go through the city, dancing in train and in couples, spending time in games and amusements, in dinners and feasts. (20)

It is significant that in this context, despite both the social prohibitions of his time and his own frequently moralizing stance, Villani puts judgment aside to celebrate the dancers. A similarly positive assessment of the Sienese dancers, with all their erotic potential, is, as Jonathan Alexander has suggested, worth exploring. Alexander rightly recognized the value of their eroticism as part of the imagery of generation proper to the celebration of May Day. (21)

Villani's "companies of ladies and maidens, wearing garlands of flowers on their heads.. . dancing in train and in couples" are certainly relatives of the figures in Ambrogio's frescoes, but while the painted dancers had important social correlatives, both in May Day celebrations and in weddings and other similar festivities, their presence in the fresco cycle is neither anecdotal nor simply illustrative of social practice. The dancers, who appear in association with the bridal procession represented on the far left of the cityscape, are surely to be taken as signs of peace and concord. (22) As Chiara Frugoni has observed, the larger political significance of weddings had to do with a notion of altruistic love, which an ideal marriage represented, and toward which human society properly strove. (23) I would take the argument one step further to propose that it is not just an idea but also an experience of love, both positive and negative, that is evoked by the dancers' presence.

As in the rituals commemorated by Villani, so also in Ambrogio's fresco, the masked dance has a mythic dimension, which cannot fully be fathomed from a historical or objective perspective. Far from simply reflecting social norms, such ritualistic activities, as vital forms of mythopoesis, aimed to suspend time and cut through contingent boundaries--social, political, temporal, sexual, and linguistic--in hope of recapturing, quite literally re-presenting, the potential for commonwealth. This is why, for example, the laws prohibiting public dancing and luxurious dress were often suspended during rites of celebration.(24) It is surely true, as Richard Trexler observed, that this goal was the stuff of dreams and did not find a corresponding "reality" in the festivals themselves, which were both far less inclusive and far more politicized than their representations would suggest. (25) Since we are dealing here with an elaborate and multifaceted fiction, the dream, the lost reality that it masks, and the contingent experience of "delirium, disengagement and breach" must all be taken into account as components of the poetic undertaking.

The conditions of mythmaking and poetic remembrance, so eloquently bound up, for example, in Giovanni Boccaccio's Genealogiae deorum gentilium (1350-75), explain the limitations of social history, iconography, and philology, all heirs to a modern notion of history that depends on boundaries, values diachrony over synchrony, and objectifies the past, to respond fully to the vital species of mythopoetic imagery to which Ambrogio's dancers belong. (26) The study of the Genealogiae deorum, as it has evolved in recent scholarship, is an exemplary case of how poststructural approaches to the problem of interpretation have rescued from near oblivion a text that was as important in its own time as it has been perplexing to modern classical philologists. Jeremiah Reedy spoke for the latter tradition in the introduction to his translation of Boccaccio's "Defense of Poetry" (Genealogiae, book 14) when he characterized, with evident ambivalence, Boccaccio's scholarship: "Initially the reader of the Genealogy is impressed by the scope of Boccaccio's knowledge of classical literature.... Recent scholarship has shown, however, that, by modern standards, Boccaccio as a scholar leaves much to be desired.... Even in the case of Vergil, Ovid, Cicero, and Seneca Boccaccio frequently quotes from decadent compilations or from memory...." (27) The problem, particularly for those who seek to localize value and/or objectify meaning, either in a poetic text or in an image, is succinctly explained by Mary Carruthers, in the conclusion to her work on medieval memory.

Indeterminacy of meaning is the very character of recollective gathering. Emotions are the matrix of memory impressions, and so--of course--desire moves intellect, as all learning is based on remembering. These themes of deconstruction and psychoanalytic criticism are not socially subversive when we detect them in medieval literature; they are the tradition itself. (28)

The stalemate that has been reached in the scholarship on the Sienese frescoes between those who recognize the eroticism implied in the costumes of the dancers but are unsure what to do with it, and those who avoid the issue altogether by assigning the dancers to the realm of "symbolic figures" seems to buttress the contention that the historicizing perspective cannot ultimately accommodate, except in implicitly negative or explicitly subversive, terms, either a memorialistic culture, like that of the Middle Ages, or a memorial rite, like that imagined in the Sienese frescoes. (29) An initial key to the resolution of the stalemate, therefore, lies in the observation that Ambrogio's dancers appear to be participants in a festive ritual, a context in which dressing alla ninfa transcended its negative social implications to acquire the mythic dimension that is written into the very history of the word nymph.

Before tracing that history it is necessary to draw an obvious but easily overlooked distinction between the real festivals and their poetic and/or visual representations. While the real festivals were animated by the living bodies of the city's noble youths, Ambrogio's dancers have no bodies. Indeed, where modem interpreters have identified the dancers' costumes as festive masks, Dante might have compared the dancers themselves to masks, or larve. (30) The relevant use of the term appears in the thirtieth canto of Paradiso, where the poet describes the transformation into angels of the springtime flowers and the sparks he had first encountered on the banks of the River of Paradise: "Then, as folk who have been under masks [sotto larve] seem other than before, if they do off the semblances not their own wherein they were hid, so into greater festival the flowers and the sparks did change before me that I saw both the courts of Heaven made manifest" (lines 9l-96). (31) The flowers and sparks that unmask themse lves in this canto represent, of course, Dante's own poetic fiction, as do the newly unmasked "courts of Heaven." The absent subject, which the poet progressively veils and unveils in a complex interweaving of metaphor, is nothing less than the living spirit of the world (the anima mundi), a spirit in which Dante, like all living beings, participates. (32) It is noteworthy in this regard that larve are explicitly associated by Dante with both springtime and festivity, and thereby also with the experience of natural generation. This is a set of associations that, as I will demonstrate in some detail, is also at play in the Sienese frescoes. Ambrogio's dancers may be masks, but they are only empty masks insofar as their audience fails to engage in the affective power of the image.

Like the word larva, the word nymph has carried its mythic significance into the present through the medium of modern scientific nomenclature. Anyone familiar with modern (that is, post-Linnaean) entomological vocabulary will be struck by the correspondence between the terms of my discussion and the terms we might now use to describe the insect imagery on the Sienese dancers' dresses. While Dante might have used the word larva to describe the dancers and their clothing, modem viewers--who have inherited an interpretation of the word that, like Dante's, derives from its ancient Latin use to designate a mask--will recognize the wormlike creatures on the dress of one of the dancers as larvae. (33) The word nymph likewise attaches simultaneously to Ambrogio's dancers and the world of insects, albeit along a different set of historical vectors. In ancient Latin, as in most modern European languages, the intermediary stage in the life cycle of an insect--when the still sexually immature creature begins to take on t he recognizable form of the adult--was called the nymph. (34) The term occurs, for example, in Pliny's description of the generation of bees: "The king is from the start the colour of honey. . . and is not a maggot but has wings from the very start. The remaining throng when they begin to take shape [formam capere coepit] are called nymphs [nymphae], while the sham ones [fuci] are called sirens or drones. (35) Pliny's use of such words as nympha and siren to describe the life cycle of an insect shows that the descriptive language of natural history has long been associated with mythopoetic language. While Pliny remained a source of natural history throughout the Middle Ages, it is difficult to establish with any certainty whether this particular use of the word nympha would have been familiar to Ambrogio and his con temporaries, although it is certainly possible.

The correspondence of ancient and modern terms, in any case, cannot be taken as philological proof of the identity or meaning of Ambrogio's dancers. It speaks, instead, to Kristeva's understanding of poetic language not as the locus of meaning but rather as a conveyor of meaning, an understanding that mirrors a medieval Christian notion of poetry as a mediator between words, as both sensible signs and the prior nonsensible reality that they represent. (36) The great difference between the poststructural understanding of poetic language and the one to which Dante subscribed is that Dante's poetic enterprise had a real and timeless center in its theological-cosmological goal, while Kristeva's poetic enterprise, which follows Jacques Lacan's revision of Freudian semiotics, has no similarly timeless reality at its center, but rather thrives on continuously renewed contingent relationships.

On the specific topic of naming animals, it bears remembering that the premodern Christian view of language held that the identity between the word and the thing that was accomplished in Adam's naming of the animals was corrupted with the Expulsion from Paradise and fragmented, along with the fragmentation of language in general, with the destruction of the Tower of Babel. (37) Thereafter, the process of naming God's creatures became a poetic enterprise whose unreachable goal was to reassemble, through the play of metaphor, the Incarnation of the Word. The poetic dialogue thus stands in place of the fragmented identity of word and thing. Looking back to Ambrogio's dancers with this understanding, I would suggest that a new method of interpretation has emerged, precisely at the point where the philological method failed. Indeed, even if the entomological connotation of the word nymph was not familiar to Ambrogio, the process of associative wordplay or poetic thinking that produced both Pliny's descriptive term inology and a corresponding (but not identical) modern one certainly was--however unfamiliar such a process might be to a modern scientific culture that often draws a hard line between taxonomy and poetry. (38)

The process of discovery I have just described is offered not as a proof but rather as a relatively self-contained demonstration of a larger hermeneutic enterprise within which my contribution to the interpretation of Ambrogio's frescoes is situated. More than two decades ago, Hans Robert Jauss provided an explanation of a literary hermeneutics whose proximate goal was to rescue from oblivion those very traditions of medieval poetry, including Brunetto's works, that are most relevant to Ambrogio's frescoes. In a now-famous essay entitled (in translation) "The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature," Jauss described the stages of a process of reading in which the initial hermeneutic bridge is provided by a naive, historically uninformed, and pleasurable recognition, a recognition that makes possible the impression of reading. (39) This naive recognition is followed in the course of reading by the awareness, registered in a sense of displeasure, of the alterity or "surprising otherness of the world opene d up by the text." In the next step this preconscious recognition of otherness is exteriorized: "In order to become conscious of this otherness of a departed past, a reflective consideration of its surprising aspects is called for, an activity which methodologically entails the reconstruction of the horizon of expectation of the addressees for whom the text was originally composed." (40) Most historians of cultural artifacts would recognize in these last lines a fair description of their aim, but for Jauss the hermeneutic enterprise does not end with that accomplishment. As he explained: "This second hermeneutic step meanwhile cannot in itself be the absolute goal of understanding, if the knowledge of otherness of a distant text-world so gained is to be more than simply a sharpened variation of historical reification, objectified through the contrast of horizons." (41) The obstacle Jauss hoped to overcome through the perpetuation of the hermeneutic process of reading was a premise that the German philosopher HansGeorg Gadamer called the "naive assumption of historicism": that is, the idea that "we must set ourselves within the spirit of the age, and think with its ideas and thoughts, not with our own." (42) The guiding principle of interpretation for Jauss and other followers of Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics is summarized by Jauss in the following terms: "Significance, which is unlocked through aesthetic experience, arises from the convergence of effect [Wirkung] and reception. It is no atemporal, basic element which is always already given; rather it is the never-completed result of a process of progressive and enriching interpretation, which concretizes--in an ever new and different manner--the textually immanent potential for meaning in the change of historical horizons." (43)

The value of hermeneutics--applied in broadly cultural terms--for the understanding of the Sienese frescoes is that in recognizing a fundamental subjectivity that is only apparently removed by the assumption of historicism, it also makes room to negotiate, from our own historical horizon, the problem, if not the irretrievable content, of subjective experience. The construction of the subject, implied in Brunetto's Tesoretto (as it is in so many other poems of exile) by the very possibility of a negotiation between the poet's own contingent experience of exile and a common experience of nature, is at the very heart of a notion of commonwealth that remains to be explored through the medium of Ambrogio's frescoes for the Sala dei Nove. It is therefore incumbent on modern viewers to enter into the hermeneutic process and enrich, in the negotiation between our own horizon of experience and that of the Sienese artist, the meaning of commonwealth. With this goal in mind, I will return to the history of the word nymp h and, through that lens, to a view of the tradition of late medieval naturalism that informs the imagery of the Sienese dancers.

In the poetic language of the late Middle Ages, nympha (ninfa in the Italian vernacular) generally referred to a maiden or, more specifically, to any of a group of mythological maidens: the semideities who were the spirits of all the places in nature. So, for example, in Alain de Lille's elaborate description of the advent of Lady Nature in De planctu naturae (ca. 1165), the nymphs make their appearance to pay tribute, as representatives of the various places in nature, to the great lady. (44) This work and another by Alain, Anticlaudianus (ca. 1170), were fundamental texts for an important tradition of late medieval poetry that was characterized by a positive assessment of earthly love and language as part of a natural ethics. This current of naturalism (which itself had deep cultural roots in the Neoplatonic writings of the sixth-century scholar Boethius) (45) saw its first significant developments in twelfth-century France and has been identified both with aspects of courtly production and with the new Pla tonism of the school of Chartres. (46)

The ethical principle of active engagement with the world of natural emotions could not have found more fertile ground than in the communes of central Italy, where, as Randolph Stain has justly emphasized, political survival depended far more heavily on words and deeds than it did on God-given rights. (47) Its appeal to civic rhetoricians like Brunetto Latini and Dante is apparent in their writings. In his Tesoretto, Brunetto offered an Italian vernacular rendition of Lady Nature and her realm that is clearly indebted to a similar description in Alain's De planctu naturae. (48) In the latter, the cosmos and its creatures are depicted in the regalia and raiment of an allegorical lady. As described by Alain, her diadem represents the heavens with all the constellations, while her clothing represents the earthly realm. Her dress hosts a convention of animals of the air, her mantle a story in pictures of aquatic animals, her tunic a magic picture of the land animals, the upper parts of her shoes and undergarments (so Alain modestly imagines) a smiling picture of the trees and herbs, and the lower parts of her shoes a charming display of flowers. (49) While following in Alain's footsteps, Brunetto describes nature's creations not precisely as her clothing but rather as a great company that precedes her, and from which she emerges into view. Having begun to describe this vision in its boundless variety and mutability, Brunetto interrupts his speech with what amounts to a declaration of defeat:

...no man could name them with speech or put them into categories; but this much I can say of them: that I saw them obey, end and begin, die and be born, and take their nature [prender lor natura], just as I saw a figure who was approaching, and it seemed to me that she was incarnate... (50)

The impossibility of representing nature is thus openly conceded by Brunetto, whose imagery is at once more topographically realistic and less powerfully evocative of protean creativity than Alain's earlier imagery had been.

The dilemma for Brunetto, as for all other poets in this tradition, was that the fixing of an image worked against the very mutability of nature that they were at pains to describe. The problem is even more apparent in the visual translations of Lady Nature, which generally take the form of a personification, sometimes accompanied by representatives of her creations, as for example in the lovely bas-de-page drawings of the Florentine manuscript of the Tesoretto of about 1300 now in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence (Fig. 5). (51) In other instances, including Ambrogio's own lost personification of springtime for the frescoes of the Sala dei Nove--an image that was faithfully copied in the frescoes of the Casa Corboli in Asciano--nature's creations appeared, following Alain's example, in the raiment of an elegant lady. (52)

Typical of all such imagery is the tension between abstraction and description that Mechthild Modersohn observed in her recent study of the representation of nature as a goddess in the late Middle Ages. Modersohn argued that as interest in the encyclopedic description of nature's creations grew it led to the disappearance of the personification of Lady Nature. (53) The disappearance of the personification did not, however, signal a diminished importance, as the subject of representation, of Lady Nature as a living body. In the case of Ambrogio's dancers, her presence is all the more powerfully evoked in the absence of the personification: she has become, both figuratively and quite literally speaking, the absent subject (Fig. 6).

The most obvious clue to the relation between the late medieval poetic imagery of nature and Ambrogio's dancers is the decoration of the dresses of the two centrally located dancers with dragonflies and caterpillars respectively. While unusual, the dragonflies at least constitute plausible ornament, perhaps inspired by the decorative patterns of Oriental origin that were popular in contemporary silks. (54) The appearance of caterpillars, on the other hand, is quite remarkable, and not so easily explained as ornament. The insect motifs, however, are explicable as part of a synecdoche for the everchanging clothing of Lady Nature, and not only as discrete representatives of her creations. Through their association with the cyclical pattern of the dance they also evoke the process of generation that Brunetto indicated when he told of the creatures that "take their nature [prender lor natura]."

How this process was understood at the time, and what it has to do with the dancers' attire may be gathered from the discussion of the generation of insects in Albertus Magnus's De animalibus, the great encyclopedic work written in the middle of the thirteenth century. Albertus, whose understanding of natural processes was based on observation as well as received knowledge, describes the life cycle of a caterpillar in the following manner: (55)

A caterpillar [eruca] is a long worm of varied colors with many short feet. This worm initially, as is the habit of silkworms and spiders, weaves webs in the terminal branches of trees and here deposits numerous eggs. From these eggs tiny caterpillars emerge in the early spring, which in August crawl under rooftops and, hanging from the walls in cracks, draw about themselves a hard skin having divested their earlier hairy skin, and assume the life, so to speak, of a sleeping dormant animal. From this almost egglike nature, they take on another flying form....(56)

Variations of this process are described at other places in the treatise, for instance, in the entry on the silkworm (lanificus), where Albertus, ever concerned with the relative strength of the vital spirit as made manifest in different animal forms, explains that the winged creature that emerges from the cocoon is less weak (debile) than the antecedent worm.

This creature has the same reproductive process as the caterpillar. In its initial stage it is a worm that eats the leaves of the mulberry tree and spins a good-quality silk.... It weaves about itself a cocoon of saffron or white threads: the other colors of silk cloth are made by art. While enclosed in the hollow space in the center of the cocoon, it metamorphoses into an egglike form from which erupts a flying winged [insect, which is] less weak than the worm was. (57)

Ambrogio's caterpillars and dragonflies are understandable in this general context as representations of the immature and mature stages in a cycle of generation: the initial wormlike stage and the more vital winged stage that emerges from the chrysalis. The dress of a third dancer--the one located behind the figure with the caterpillar dress and linking hands with the figure in the dragonfly dress--clinches the argument (Fig. 6). It is decorated with a series of oblong white capsules, which taper to black nodes at each end and are vertically bisected by a thin, slightly wavy red line. Like the caterpillars and dragonflies on the adjacent dresses, these forms stand out from the graphic patterns that surround them because they appear to be organic, if highly schematized in their rendering of anatomy. Given the context, it seems more than likely that the natural form to which these capsules refer is what we would now call the chrysalis: in other words, the form that Albertus described as the hard-skinned and dor mant state under which the creature is reborn.

A close examination of the fresco reveals a series of allusions to metamorphosis. For instance, both the caterpillars and the dragonflies are emblazoned with diagonal red stripes, as if to indicate a relationship between them. On another level, and even more intriguingly, the idea of shedding an "earlier hairy skin" is evoked in the slashed sleeves and hem of the caterpillar dress. The detail of the slashed sleeves is striking because the sleeves of the other dancers' dresses are all decorously laced. The relations among the creatures thus variously represented, of course, have much more to do with pictorial imagination than they do with what we now understand to be the biological facts of generation. Even by late medieval standards, the imagery would not have held up under scrutiny as scientific illustration, and it is not offered to the viewer as such. To cite only the most obvious problem from a biological point of view, immature dragonflies do not have the form of caterpillars.

In the figure of the dancers, as in the fresco cycle as a whole, Ambrogio was fabricating a composite image, the individual parts of which were empirically verifiable but the unifying subject of which was, by definition, beyond representation. (58) The point is easily made by comparing the figure of the dancers to the imagery associated with the personification of concordia in the diagrammatic portion of the fresco cycle (Fig. 1). Although Lady Concordia's named task is to twist together the cords she receives from the scales of Justice, the personification is not furnished with a spindle or any other sort of instrument that might have been used to manufacture rope. She is instead equipped with a plane, which is obviously a carpenter s tool. While the resulting image is incoherent either as a representation of rope making or as a representation of carpentry, it is perfectly coherent as a portrayal of concord. Indeed, as Quentin Skinner has argued, the inclusion of the plane amplifies the representation of the foundations of peaceful civic society by introducing the leveling function of aequitas as the necessary complement of concordia. (59) The same sort of poetic thinking clearly guided the composition of the insect imagery in and on the dancers' dresses. In this instance Ambrogio was not illustrating the life cycle of a caterpillar, a dragonfly, or any other singular biological entity. He was attempting to represent the infinitely diverse and protean body of nature, a context in which variety was the guiding principle.

The costumes of Ambrogio's dancers stand as one piece of evidence, among many others, that the relation between natura--understood as the process of becoming--and poesis, or poetic making in general, was strongly perceived in the late Middle Ages. (60) Beginning from the premise that the material reference for the painted dresses was undoubtedly silk, it is possible to unravel and reassemble the fabric of Ambrogio's fiction on yet another level. As was surely well known in fourteenth-century Siena--an important trade viaduct and consumer for the silk industry of nearby Lucca--the raw material from which silk was manufactured was made by a caterpillar. (61) The process of silk production, as indicated by Albertus in his description of the generation of silkworms, supplied a ready matrix for an exploration of the relation between natural and artistic production. Referring to the transformation of the caterpillar into an egglike form from which it will be reborn, Albertus explains, "It weaves about itself a coco on of saffron or white threads: the other colors of silk cloth are made by art." Viewed in this light, it appears that the golden color of Ambrogio's caterpillar dress may have something to contribute to the question of meaning, reflecting, as it does, the natural color of the thread produced by a silkworm. The color of the other dancers' dresses, by comparison, could only have been "made by art," specifically, the art of the dyer. A next level of artifice represented in the dancers' costumes is the weaving of the fictive fabric, least apparent in the caterpillar dress and much more apparent in the dragonfly dress. While the caterpillar dress is devoid of geometric patterning, the chrysalis dress has an overall calligraphic pattern. Among the three dresses decorated with animal motifs, only in the dragonfly dress are the animal forms framed into a bilaterally symmetrical pattern, suggesting that the animal form has been assimilated to the woven structure of the fabric. At the next level of the fiction, there is the weaving pattern of the dance itself. The dancers pass through the line they have formed, tracing a pattern that artfully reenacts, but does not reproduce, the process of weaving. (62) Finally, we must take account of Ambrogio the painter as a weaver of fiction. By means of his brush, the strokes of which are clearly evident in the calligraphic pattern of the chrysalis dress, Ambrogio has woven both his own agency and, by association, human agency in general into a metaphor for the relation between the process of nature and that of art. (63)

What we see in the Sienese dancers is the masking of nature as process, compared to the process of generation--which provided the material of the metaphor--and animated by analogy to the cyclical process of a dance. Unlike the pattern of a carol (or round dance), which has no beginning and no end, the rhythmic circuit of the ridda (or chain dance), from which the painted dancers take their inspiration, opens, winds back under itself, immanently to close, reopen, and repeat the pattern in a perpetually renewed cycle. It is understandable, here, as a reenactment of the cycle of generation as described by Lady Nature in Brunetto's poem, a process in which nature's creations are born and die only to be born again. This conclusion coincides, in large part, with the one that Curt Sachs reached many decades ago, through a more universalizing approach, in his World History of the Dance. Sachs identified Ambrogio's dance as the particular type of chain dance, or ridda, that forms a figure by passing under an arch. (64 ) Such arch dances, Sachs observed, are frequently found, in various cultures, associated with a funerary context, wherein they symbolize the renewal of life. The case is easy enough to argue for the Sienese dance, in which the dancer with the dragonfly dress is shown about to pass under the bridge and through the line, a passage that by implication stands for the passage from life to death, death to life. The cycle of the dance may thus be taken as a metaphor for the process of remembrance, where the subject remembered is the subject par excellence, namely, the generative power of nature. (65)

While Ambrogio's dancers constitute a highly accomplished moment in the history of late medieval nature imagery, they do not stand on their own. They are part of a much larger and complex pictorial fiction explicating the relation of the city and its governors (or "fathers") to the peaceful commonwealth. It is therefore necessary to consider how this remarkable motif stands, both structurally and thematically, in relation to the larger picture of the city. To do so it is useful to turn to Boccaccio, who, in his Ninfale fiesolano--a fable pertaining to the foundation of Fiesole and Florence--dramatized the mythic significance of dressing as a nymph ("a modo d'una ninfa"). Boccaccio's poem, a pastoral romance in rhymed octaves set in the hills surrounding Florence before the dawn of civilization, has been aptly described as a hymn to nature. It is generally dated to about 1344, only a few years after Ambrogio painted the Sienese frescoes. (66) Although it cannot be considered as a textual source for Ambrogio's imagery, it nevertheless constitutes a comparable and equally sophisticated exploration, in contemporary Tuscan poetry, of the discursive relations between lyric and narrative, nature and civilization, myth and history.

At the center of Boccaccio's poem is a masquerade orchestrated by Venus. Advising Boccaccio's lovelorn young shepherd, Africo, to adopt a feminine guise in order to gain the company of a nymph in the following of Diana, Venus assures him of success with the following advice: "You will certainly be judged a nymph like the others, if only you take care to remain under cover while you are with them [Tu parrai ninfa per certo / se lu saprai con lor andar coperto]." Boccaccio describes his young shepherd early in the romance in terms drawn largely from the lexicon of vernacular love poetry: "beardless still, with locks of curly blond hair and a face fair as a lily or a rose [sanz'ancor barba avere, / e le sue chiome bionde e crespe, / ed il suo viso parea un giglio o rosa] " (67) Inflamed by his love for the nymph Mensola, and under the coaching of Venus, Boccaccio's androgynous youth borrows his mother's gown, which he binds with vines to facilitate easy movement. Having thus made himself over or, as Boccaccio pu ts it, "counterfeited" himself as a nymph, Africo then goes off into the wooded hills of Fiesole to join Diana's nymphs. (68)

Africo's mask is worth exploring here as a poetic figure because it provides a useful structural analogue for the masked dance presented in the midst of Ambrogio's cityscape. Boccaccio describes the effect of Africo's mask in the following verses:

As for his hair, as yet untamed, it fell to a modest length, but was so blond that it appeared to be filled with gold, and with curls of surpassing beauty; although his face was still pale from distress [per gli affanni passati], nevertheless, that coloring was such that it augmented his feminine appearance.

And he was made up in such a manner--with his quiver strapped to his right side, and his bow in hand, and a happy arrow--that he seemed to be that which he was not, a female from a male transformed. And certainly, whoever didn't know him to be male would never have recognized it. (69)

As has been noted by the poem's modern commentators, the lyric description of Africo made over as a nymph recalls the description of the angelic Mensola that appears near the beginning of the romance, after the young shepherd first espies the would-be object of his heart's desire. It is, however, an obviously incomplete or imperfect human mirror of the earlier description. While Africo's hair is of modest length, but so fair that it seems filled with gold, Mensola's, likewise fair as gold, is of great length. More tellingly, his face is pallid from the breathtaking anxiety (affanni) he has suffered in the absence of his beloved Mensola, whereas we know that the sight of her shining eyes has the power to suspend all such anxiety. As the poet tells us, "whoever sees her never suffers distress [chi li vede non sente mai affanni]." It seems that if the mirror of the poet's description were replaced by Mensola's real presence, we would see Africo's affliction healed, his desire fulfilled, the image realized or mad e whole. The fulfillment of the desire represented by the image is, however, ultimately beyond reach, for the only access to the presence of the beloved lady is itself only a poetic veil, a mask for a reality that, however powerfully evoked, recedes infinitely from view.

When Boccaccio interrupts his narrative to produce a lyric description of Africo made over as a nymph, a description that mirrors the earlier description of Mensola, he effectively collapses the fictional time of the narrative, transposing his subject--which is nature's breath-giving or animating power--by shifting, on axis, its relation with the audience. Instead of being asked to follow the narrative line, the viewer is now asked to confront the subject directly, as in a mirror. In this sense, Africo's mask may justifiably be described as a nuse-en-abyme. This term, much used in contemporary literary criticism, was coined in 1893 by Andre Gide to describe an effect in a work of art wherein he found "transposed, at the level of the characters, the subject of the work itself." (70) Although the term mise-en-abyme was invented for textual criticism and has been adopted and reinvented many times primarily for that purpose, Gide originally explicated the effect by referring to visual structures, which represente d for him the possibility of simultaneity. (71) The notion of replication was both exemplified and complicated by Gide with reference to northern European paintings, where, in his words, "a small dark convex mirror reflects, in its turn, the interior of the room in which the action of the painting takes place." (72)

Ambrogio's dancers do not have the form of a mirror, but their function within the fresco cycle is related to that of Gide's mirrors in several ways, the first of which becomes evident in a comparison between the Sienese dancers and the masked youth of Boccaccio's Ninfale. (73) Just as Africo was presented by Boccaccio as a costumed counterpart of the more naturally attired Mensola, so also Ambrogio's dancers appear as masked counterparts of the more naturally and scantily attired figure of Peace on the adjacent wall (Fig. 1). Whereas they wear elaborately decorated tunics, she wears only a nearly transparent white shift, or camicia; whereas they wear vaguely floral-looking crowns on their heads, she wears a realistically rendered crown of olive branches, complete with leaves, flowers, and fruit. The physical distance between the two parts of the metaphor is thus collapsed by the process of comparison in the viewer's imagination.

Ambrogio's dancers also bear a structural relation to Gide's mirrors in their equivocal status within the surrounding narrative. At the very heart of the motif of the dance, where we might expect to find a personification of nature, we find instead an instrument, more specifically, a tambourine (Fig. 7). While the tambourine is understandable under one aspect as a narrative accoutrement of the dance, under another aspect it becomes detached from that role. It is isolated in a void between two of the dancers and displayed flat against the painted surface in such a manner that its membrane both confronts the viewer and effectively confounds the difference between figure and ground. For the viewer thus confronted, it both suggests and denies the possibility of vision. This type of structure is a familiar one in fourteenth-century ivories, where, in the midst of narrative sequences, the viewer is often confronted with an apparent aperture disguised as a prop, as for example in an ivory version of the tale of the Prodigal Son displayed on a casket in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Fig. 8). Here, in the scene of the Prodigal Son feasting with the prostitutes, we find that one of the "ladies" holds the type of crown with which a courtly lady might crown her lover, but in a very suggestive manner. The crown is displayed flat against her body so that it appears both to frame a portion of her dress and to reveal the point of sexual penetration in a particularly deeply carved fold at the center of the frame. In the ivory the lewd reading of the motif is laterally reinforced by the appearance, in the previous scene, of a circlet hanging on a pole: a sign for a brothel and a thinly disguised stand-in for the act of sexual penetration. In the Sienese frescoes, by comparison, the representation of penetration in the figure of the dancer passing under the interwoven arms of her companions and through the line appears beside rather than within the aperture provided by the tambourine. The meaningful difference in Ambrog io's employment of the structural trick rests in the fact that the visual metaphor is split apart, rather than being reiterated as it is in the ivory. The effect is to suspend the conclusion but not the act of erotic reading, as viewers are called on to reassemble the pieces of the metaphor in their own imaginations.

Rosamond Tuve once argued, in an incidental but nonetheless important contribution to the understanding of the poetic workings of the Sienese frescoes, that the abstract divisions of the allegory serve not just to examine and relate predetermined ideas but also to generate them. (74) As she explained, the depicted relation between the court of tyranny and that of legitimately constituted sovereignty is made up of complex divisions and associations that the audience must actively compose and recompose in the process of viewing. So, for example, the representation of concordia, itself complicated by the plane of aequitas, finds a response, rather than a simple structural opposition, in the figure labeled divisio (not discordia), who appears in the court of tyranny. As part of the visual apparatus representing division (not inequity) the personification is equipped with a saw, another carpenter's tool, with which she divides the object she holds in her left hand. In the interplay of visual signs, meaning, which is never wholly present and always deferred, is continually reconstructed by the viewer in the process of reading. Quentin Skinner, whose familiarity with the writings of the dictatores and notaries of communal Italy made much of Ambrogio's imagery recognizable to him, was prompted by that recognition to engage in a the poetic reading of the allegory. (75) He was accordingly chastised by Chiara Frugoni for not reading the fresco as a "judicious and experienced student of iconography" would. (76) Such criticism, while justified on its own terms, does not entertain the possibility that iconography, understood as a quasiscientific method, cannot respond to the poetic makeup of the frescoes.

In the figure of the dancers the division that is represented through a dialogue of complex and interwoven oppositions across the room and around the figure of Justice is transposed, as in a portrait, into a division between the viewer and the absent subject. The presence of meaning is thereby suggested, and not simply in the sense that is recovered through an iconographic reading of the dance as a symbol of harmony. Meaning in this case has a deeply affective sense, which implies the construction of viewer, medieval or modern, as subject. The affective role of Ambrogio's dancers may be further articulated by considering the mythic force of the dance, on the one hand, and the character of the visual metaphor as a counterpart of the lyrical portrayal of love, on the other.

To elucidate the force of the dance in a mythic context, it is necessary to turn to one of Boccaccio's ancient sources. The text in question, Statius's Achilleid, was well known throughout the Middle Ages, having been a standard in the Latin schoolbooks. It was certainly known to Boccaccio and could easily have been familiar to Ambrogio and whoever else may have been involved in the conception of the Sienese imagery. (77) In the Achilleid, a virile and wild young Achilles, who is sought by the Greek forces to join them in their war against the Trojans, is finally convinced by his mother Thetis to go into hiding after he is smitten by Deidamia, one of the maiden daughters of Lycomedes, king of Scyros. In this amorous interlude on the island of Scyros, the dance features prominently. Achilles is initially overtaken by desire for Deidamia when he witnesses a graceful dance performed by the daughters of Lycomedes in honor of Pallas Athena. (78) Significantly for the present question, Statius compares the beauty o f the maidens as they perform the graceful dance to that of Diana's nymphs. After the dance, Achilles willingly submits to his mother's plan, allowing her to array him in a long dress, which the poet describes as picturatus, literally painted or figured like a costume. (79) Thus disguised as a maiden, Achilles is introduced as his sister into the court of Lycomedes and there joins the company of the king's daughters. After a period of courtship, during which Deidamia discovers but does not disclose Achilles' secret, the masquerade ends with another dance, this for the rites of Bacchus. During these rites, from which males are explicitly excluded, Achilles joins the daughters of Lycomedes in the dance, surpassing in beauty even his beloved Deidamia. In this instance, the frenzy of the Bacchic dance reignites the furor in Achilles and, under cover of night, he rapes the virgin Deidamia. (80) As it did in the initial encounter, the dance once again figures as the generator of a powerful emotional impulse. Achill es' masquerade thus suspends both his own heroic action and that of the poem in the spellbound and idyllic moment between his initial pacification and his ultimate violent arousal. This ancient example comprises a general set of terms that can be recomposed to speak to Ambrogio's imagery. To masquerade as a nymph in the context of a ritual dance, like that represented in the frescoes, was to re-member (or momentarily hold in suspension) the erotic potential in the indescribable beauty and power of nature as a living force.

In the Sienese fresco cycle, the masked dance is presented as one of two incommensurable options for negotiating that uncertain ground between fear and security--personified in the looming figures of Timor and Securitas (Figs. 9, 10)--and compensating for the loss of a primordial and healthy state of peace. (81) The first, represented by Ambrogio in the familiar form of the allegorical diagram explaining the constitution of Siena's sovereignty, is the sustaining of justice by the fiction of human government (Fig. 3). The second--which has escaped our notice, but which Maria Menocal's marvelously syncretistic analysis of the origins of the lyric allows us to see in all its vibrant colors--is the lyric moment, in this case the dance, as a ritualistic communion of all the selves in the healing moment "when you can't tell [the difference], when it doesn't matter" (Fig. 6.) (82)

Insofar as a picture can be said to be lyrical--and I admit to stretching the limits of the term to describe an effect for which the language of visual criticism has no adequate term--Ambrogio's dance fits the criteria, not just in its material, as is obvious, but also in its conception. As has been noticed often enough, the dancers occupy a ground of their own. Their scale sets them apart from the other figures in the cityscape, and their movement is self-contained as well. Whereas the other figures that populate the cityscape are pictured as if moving from one place to another across the imaginary space of the city, none displays the animation of the group of dancers, which however, apparently moves no-where (Fig. 4). Instead of being contained by the fictive space of the illusion, Ambrogio's dancers appear to circumscribe their own space, a space that expands and collapses around the raised tambourine. The motif constitutes a remarkable presentation of arrested motion, of silent voice: one central head rai sed, mouth open in an inaudible song, fringed hems and dagged sleeves fluttering as if to register the passage of an unfelt breeze, feet beating the ground to the impalpable rhythm of the tambourine. In all its silence, the moment conjured by the dancers virtually pulses with energy.

The affective content of just such a moment was remembered three centuries later by the Neapolitan poet Giambattista Marino. Marino's Adone of 1623 includes a passage in which Marino could easily be describing Ambrogio's dancers: "Under the bridge [treccia, also meaning braid] of the upraised arms, that one then this one in line [filo, also thread] lowers her head and, twisting ringed / beringed hands [tarcendo le mani inanellate], one emerges while another passes under through the row." (83) It is significant that Marino's poetic description--which, like Ambrogio's painted one, is shot through with allusions to weaving or intertwining--occurs as part of his account of the festivities initiated by Venus for the obsequies of Adonis. The association of weaving and lyric, its roots in Western literature ancient, has a profoundly material basis in the relation between the bodily rhythm of weaving and that of song. (84) Whether or not Marino knew the Sienese imagery, the similarity between his poetic image and Amb rogio's painted one is nonetheless indicative both of a shared (if not identical) subject and of a shared achievement in the type of lyrical stasis: that power to suspend the moment between life and death, death and life, for which Marino's poetry is justly famous. (85) It is a power to which Ambrogio--a participant in the artistic manifestation of jouissance (overwhelming joy in the presence of meaning) that Kristeva found exemplified in troubadour song--also lays claim in the figure of the dancers. (86)

Many decades ago, in a characteristically tour-de-force demonstration of structural analysis, John White recognized the centrality of the dancers to the composition of the peaceful city- and countryscapes, observing that they occupy both the hub of a radiating spatial illusion and the locus of the fictive light source. (87) The implication--never made explicit by White--is that the dancers' presence is somehow generative of both space and light. (88) It is telling that earlier formalist criticism, including both White's meticulous analysis of the perspective structure of the fresco cycle and George Rowley's careful dissection of the illusion of movement conjured in the dancing group, while sublimating its responses under the guise of rational analysis in the former case and a modern aesthetic sensibility in the latter, nevertheless responded to an aspect of the imagery that has eluded the more historicizing approaches of recent years--namely, its affective power. (89) In the motif of the dancers Ambrogio reme mbered a moment of primal and youthful vitality that was born of a subjective engagement in the fiction-making process and depends for its fullness on the viewer's subjective response. The dancers [constitute] a moment both distant from, and akin to that which Homer, centuries earlier, had attempted to describe in the spellbinding image of the dance that decorates the last ring of Achilles' shield.

On it the renowned lame god embellished

A dancing ground, like the one Daedalus

Made for the ringletted Ariadne in wide Cnossus.

Young men and girls in the prime of their beauty

Were dancing there, hands clasped around wrists.

The girls wore delicate linens, and the men

Finespun tunics glistening softly with oil.

Flowers crowned the girls' heads, and the men

Had golden knives hung from silver straps.

They ran on feet that knew how to run

With the greatest ease, like a potters wheel

When he stoops to cup it in the palms of his hands

And gives it a spin to see how it runs. Then they

Would run in lines that weaved in and out.

A large crowd stood round the beguiling dance

Enjoying themselves, and two acrobats

Somersaulted among them on cue to the music.... (Iliad, 18.590-606) (90)

In a very real sense, the challenge presented by the Sienese dancers to modern audiences is to suspend judgment and be beguiled--as Homer's spectators were--by their presence.

Returning to the larger picture I would observe that although Ambrogio's representation of the peaceful commonwealth has everything to do with an idea of the rebirth of human culture, and although it owes something to the remembrance, however fragmentary, of ancient texts, it has very little to do with the normative notion of the Renaissance as that ideal and meaningful resolution of form and content that Erwin Panofsky imagined in his great thesis. (91) Avoiding the problematic elision of content (more properly, material) and meaning that so often occurs in iconographic readings along with the radical dissociation of form and meaning, I propose to reorganize the terms of the discussion and imagine the irresolution of material/form and subject/meaning as the very condition of living art as exemplified by the Sienese frescoes.

It is finally to the living traditions of vernacular poetry and festive ritual that we need to look for the real source of the Sienese imagery. Indeed, both Boccaccio's Ninfabe and Ambrogio's dancers emerged from those living traditions of popular song and festive ritual that had survived continuously, but in fragments, from antiquity, to be reinvented in the world of the communes. Fueled by the emergence of the communes as political bodies, this reinvigoration was facilitated, in part, by the new forms of vernacular poetry that had descended into Italy from the courts of Provence and northern Europe. As I have explained in another context, when courtly forms appear in communal imagery, they are more than simply hollow vestiges of a dying feudal order. (92) For Dante and his contemporaries in fourteenth-century Italy courtly poetry was a living language. Along with its relative visual forms, it served not as a purely formal and, iconographically speaking, meaningless source but as a kind of affective lens thr ough which communal poets and artists alike gained a new view of a very old and native tradition of civility. As C. Stephen Jaeger has demonstrated, the tradition of civility, while conveyed through the medium of courtly poetry, was not invented in that medium. It was part of the shared cultural memory of Europe and, specifically, of the Italian peninsula. (93) In the case of the Sienese frescoes I would argue, on poetic grounds, what Richard Trexler has already argued on socio-anthropological grounds for the case of Florence: that the courtly-noble body of the feudal aristocracy provided a real center for an elaborate fiction of sovereignty. (94)

Like much of the poetic imagery that developed out of the meeting of the metaphors of Provencal poetry with communal experience, Ambrogio's dancers may be described as vigorously realistic transformations of the more allusive imagery of troubadour poetry, and specifically of the imagery of youth, or jovens, as it had developed in that medium. The poet whose works most perfectly exemplify this kind of transformation is Folgore da San Gimignano. Folgore's surviving works, which are dated to the first decade of the fourteenth century, include three garlands of sonnets, all of which were written for the circumstances of festive courts convened to celebrate military victories and/or political alliances. (95) Particularly relevant here are his sonnets for the armament of a young knight. (96) This poetic garland comprised an introduction and a sequence of sonnets describing a young knight's initiation. The surviving sonnets include one describing the initiate stripped of his old clothes and received naked into the a rms of Lady Prowess, there to join her other lovers. Its opening stanza sets the tone for the series as a whole in its palpable eroticism: "Behold Prowess, who promptly strips him of his clothes and says: 'Friend, it is now time to molt your feathers [muda], for I will see men naked, and would that you know that my will is only this...." (97) The description of the stripping away of the youth's clothing parallels Ambrogia's dancers not only generally but in one specific way: Folgore uses the term muda--which properly refers to the molting of a bird's feathers--to describe the process of transformation. The poet thus amplifies the theme of rebirth by analogy to natural metamorphosis, just as Ambrogio did in the costumes of his dancers.

The subsequent two sonnets in the series respectively describe Lady Humility immersing the youth in her purifying bath and Lady Discretion placing him between the sheets of a luxuriously appointed bed and then commanding him to rise and be reborn in the world, to complete the cycle of regeneration. The last and most exuberant of the surviving sonnets describes the bedecking of the youth in the clothes provided by Lady Happiness.

Happiness [Allegrezza] arrives with mirth and festivity, all blooming like a rosebush; bearing him [the young knight] beautiful clothing of linen, silk, fine wool, and fur; a fillet, a hood with a garland for his head. She adorned him so that he resembled a May branch [maio]. With such a crowd that the floor began to shake, she now began to make manifest her work. She drew him tip in hose and slippers [in calze ed in pianelle], a purse and golden girdle beneath his beautiful fur cloak; singing and playing all kinds of instruments, and showing him off to the maids and squires and all who were assembled there. (98)

By thus embodying the metaphorical imagery of joy, youth, and blossoming nature in a relatively realistic image of a young knight, Folgore produced an image that--like Boccaccio's image of Africo masquerading as a nymph, and like the festively dressed dancers in Ambrogio's cityscape--was both potentially erotic and sexually ambiguous. Particularly telling of this last point is Folgore's reference to calze and pianelle as part of the festive gear of his young knight. Pianelle were flat-soled shoes raised on high platforms made of cork or wood. Such footwear was generally condemned for two reasons: first, because the stiltlike shoes allowed the woman wearing them to circumvent the sumptuary laws regulating excessively long trains; second, because such footwear hobbled the women who wore them, thus bending the female body to serve vain fashion. While recommended as a form of birth control for prostitutes, pianelle were not considered to be morally proper dress for young ladies, much less for young men? (99) Here , as throughout the sonnet, Folgore was literally exploding gender boundaries, producing a poetic image that was even more aggressively luxurious in its overabundance of ornament than Ambrogio's relatively tame dancers. (100) Viewed in light of contemporary sumptuary laws, the apparel of Folgore's young knight would certainly have constituted the sort of transvestism that was both legally controlled and morally condemned. Considered as part of the poetic imagery of springtime, however, this sort of transvestism, like that recognized by Jane Bridgeman in the Sienese dancers, is understandable as a vibrant evocation of the union between the city (represented in the figure of the young knight) and an overwhelmingly joyful and abundant nature (represented by Lady Happiness). (101)

In the end, neither Folgore's imagery nor Ambrogio's is understandable as an instance of unbridled, or giullaresque, eroticism. As Folgore's comparison of the youth to a maio, or May branch, indicates, his image of blossoming youth was circumscribed by the world of the real springtime masquerades during which the commune, in this case S. Gimignano, celebrated the renewal of its commonwealth. (102) This last observation returns us to the comparison between Ambrogio's imagery and Villani's descriptions of Florence as a peaceful state. The most elaborate and structurally complex of these descriptions occurs in the account of the establishment of the second government of the popolo in 1283.

In the year 1283, in the month of June, on the feast of San Giovanni, the city of Florence being in a healthy state of rest, a state of peace and tranquillity, which was good for the merchants and artisans, and especially for the Guelphs who ruled the land, there was constituted--in the quarter of Santa Felicita beyond the Arno, where the Rossi family ruled--a company or brigata of a thousand or more men, all dressed in white with a Lord called Love. This brigata did nothing other than occupy itself with games and amusements and dances of ladies and knights and other citizens, going through the district playing trumpets, and a variety of instruments, with joy and happiness, gathering together for festive meals. This court lasted two months and was the most noble and distinguished that ever took place in the city of Florence or in Tuscany; and to this court came many fine courtiers and jugglers, and they were all received and treated honorably. It is said that in those times the city of Florence and its citize ns enjoyed the happiest times ever, which lasted until 1284, when the strife between the popolo and the grandi began, and thereafter between the white [Guelphs] and the black. In those times there were in Florence three hundred genuine knights and many brigate of knights and of squires who, morning and night, would share their tables with many courtiers and, on special feasts, would bestow many robes of vair, for which reason courtiers and jugglers from Lombardy and all of Italy were drawn to Florence, where they were welcomed. (103)

In this passage, Villani's perspective shifts several times: from a generalized and cursory view of a peaceful mercantile city, to a memory of a specific ritual occasion that transformed a part of the city, and finally to a broadly painted nostalgic image of a courteous and chivalric city, introduced by the distancing phrase "in quei tempi" (in those times). The remembrance of youth has a pivotal role, a role that we can only fully appreciate with the understanding that when Villani spoke of the noble youths and maidens whose activities were the focus of the festivities, he was speaking both of the real youthful revelers and an idea of youth, or jovens, that, as Folgore's sonnets vividly illustrate, was a requisite condition of courtliness. (104) Likewise, in the passage quoted near the beginning of this essay, the new clothes of Villani's revelers are to be understood as new not only in the limited sense of being newly acquired but also in the expansive and very old sense that they represented the timeless, and perpetually renewable source, in nature, of the living commonwealth.

While the contingent clothing of these festivities--as evidenced by Villani's descriptive language--was distinctly courtly, the theme of the blossoming of the world, in itself, was not new. It was, in fact, an age-old component of the imagery of sovereignty, imperial and Christian, in western Europe. (105) For Villani, the memory of the parts of the commune masquerading as courts, as they continued to do on similar occasions in his own time, mediated both between the real city and the mythical court and, more fundamentally, between historical contingency and a vital and ancient idea of sovereignty that the court represented in communal Italy.

What is truly remarkable about Ambrogio's translation of this ancient theme is its animation, an animation that may be taken as the measure of a desire to traverse that unbridgeable gap between the fiction of the peaceful city and the reality of the living commonwealth. Boccaccio's Ninfale, which tells the tale of the generation of a vital and noble political body, provides a narrative bridge for the gap that both Giovanni Villani and Ambrogio Lorenzetti represented through super-impositions. It is therefore helpful to return to this tale as a means to explicate, through an appropriately poetic medium, the relation between Ambrogio's festive dancers and the urban world against which they appear.

In the Ninfale, Africo's unmasking marks a turning point in the plot. While his disguise works for a time, its limits are sorely tested and ultimately revealed when the nymphs decide to go bathing and invite their new companion to join them. Realizing that if the maidens disrobed before him, he would no longer be able to hide his mounting desire, Africo, in a typically Boccaccioesque display of human ingenuity in the face of fortune's turns, decides to take advantage of the situation to reveal the male body under his female clothing. By means of an irresistibly comical reversal of Dante's dark image of the Siren (Purgatorio, canto 19, lines 1-33), Boccaccio has Africo perform a striptease before the bathing nymphs to reveal "all that he had in front [tutto cio che avea davante]," a display that sends the nymphs screaming from the pool in terror. (106)

In accordance with the poetic tradition to which Boccaccio's image belongs, Africo's calculated striptease marks the stripping down of the fable, or the unmasking of poetic seduction. After having raped Mensola, Africo--whose earlier actions had been motivated by nature, orchestrated by Venus, and described by the poet--takes the matter temporarily into his own hands. He respins the fable in his own words, thus gaining both Mensola's forgiveness and her willing compliance to his desire. Africo's effeminate costume thus serves as a disguise that masks transformation. It masks both the transformation of the youthful protagonist into sexual maturity and the transformation of the fable itself, from a tale of uncivilized motives to one of relatively self-conscious and autonomous desire, as Africo, once the subject of the song himself, becomes, momentarily, the singing subject.

Africo's unmasking inaugurates a chain of events that parallels the transition from the matter of song to that of history. The setting of the fable gradually moves from the countryside to the city, or from nature to civilization, as the author weaves his charming pastoral song into the history of the foundation of Fiesole and Florence. In Boccaccio's tale, the union of Africo and Mensola, predictably enough, had tragic immediate results in the suicide of Africo and the punishment of Mensola by the goddess Diana, who transforms the wayward nymph into the stream that still winds through the Tuscan countryside between Florence and Fiesole. In the long run, the union also had positive results in the birth of the beautiful, eloquent, and courteous young Pruneo, who, according to Boccaccio, would grow up to become the first native governor of the newly founded city of Fiesole. Boccaccio thus gave the Ninfale the appearance of an etiological fable, or a fable of origins. The founding of the city of Fiesole by the my thical (and foreign) king Attalante witnessed the destruction of the chaste, ascetic (and natural) order of the goddess Diana and the concomitant ascent of the principle of active and natural love represented by Africo, Pruneo, and their descendants. (107) During periods of good government, the descendants of Pruneo provided the ethical core of the civic nobility, first in Fiesole and then later in Florence; during the period of tyranny under Totila, they retreated to their ancestral homes "nel lor primaio antico colle," which is to say in the hills around Fiesole, where their story, and Tuscan history, had their beginnings. Boccaccio's poem is not so much a fable about the origins of a place as it is about the original and perpetually renewable source--natural and amorous--of urban nobility.

It is important to note that nobility is not presented by Boccaccio as inherent to the city: it is born with Pruneo in the countryside. Once the city is founded and Diana's chaste order dispersed, nature and civilization exist in a perennial and necessary dialogue with each other, a dialogue that is periodically revived by retreating, as Pruneo's progeny would do, to its origins in the countryside. The pattern is repeated by Boccaccio in the Decameron (1348), in which a group of young Florentines, faced with the devastation of their city by the plague, retire to the countryside where they establish a fictive society in the form of a court. Their goal went beyond escaping death by remaining in the idyllic country retreat. Indeed, their perfect courtly society is openly acknowledged as a kind of ephemeral play. As Marga Cottino-Jones has argued, their goal (and that of Boccaccio) was to regenerate, in the face of death and through the medium of storytelling, the potential for a new, harmonious, and healthy huma n society. In the Decameron, as in the Ninfale, the experience of the natural world is not an end in itself, nor is it entirely personal: rather, it fulfills a social function by providing, in Cottino-Jones's words, "the necessary means to face the city again and to potentially shape there a perfected form of social existence." (108) Expanding the idea of a city-country dialogue beyond the bounds of Boccaccio's poetry and into the cities of fourteenth-century Tuscany, it could be said that while the order of civilization may long since have replaced that of nature, the memory of nature's healing power lived on to be reconstituted in the festive rites for which Africo's mask is a poetic analogue, and to which Ambrogio's dancers, like Villani's, certainly point.

The splendid figures inhabiting the center foreground of the peaceful cityscape do not simply stand at the intersection between the viewer and a lost commonwealth in nature; they visually animate that intersection. For Brunetto, the dancers might be said to participate in the remembrance of a common but divided nature that animates the idea of commonwealth. In the language of contemporary psychoanalytic criticism, which mirrors but does not reproduce the subject content of Brunetto's experience, they might be said to participate in the affective power of the lyric moment to suspend difference and heal the wounds that divide both the self and society. While psychoanalytic criticism cannot ultimately recover the subjective content or meaning of either Brunetto's or Ambrogio's representations of nature's life-giving power, it nevertheless provides a new set of contingent clothing through which the experience of commonwealth, forever lost and never the same, can once again be remembered. Like the rituals to which it refers, the moment portrayed in Ambrogio's dancers is at once potent and ephemeral, infinitely old and perpetually renewed by its audience. As profoundly affective and equally contingent mirrors of the shared nature that lent both Ambrogio's art and Siena's political body their vitality, the dancers are nothing less and nothing more than the city's new clothes.

Notes

The present paper is part of a larger book project on the poetry of commonwealth in the art of 14th-century Tuscany. The research and writing of the paper were facilitated by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and an early version was presented at the Annual Conference of the Universities Art Association of Canada, Guelph, 1995. I would like to thank Cathleen Hoeniger, who, on the occasion of that paper, pointed me toward the writings of Albertus Magnus. I am also grateful to the students of recent graduate seminars at Emory University, who have worked with patience and insight through some of the interpretative models I explore in this essay, and particularly to Shelley MacLaren, who helped in the final stages of its preparation. Finally I would like to thank Perry Chapman and the anonymous readers for the Art Bulletin for their thoughtful criticism.

Unless otherwise indicated, the translations provided in the main body of the text are mine.

(1.) Kristeva, 4-5.

(2.) Brunetto Latini, Il tesoretto (The Little Treasure), lines 163-179, ed. and trans. Julia Bolton Holloway (New York: Garland, 1981). The passage, in translation, reads as follows: "And taking stock [ponendo cura], I returned to the nature that I have heard is possessed by every man coming into the world. First he is horn to his father [padre] and relations; and then to his city state; so that I know none whom I would wish to have my city entirely in his control, or that it be divided; but all in common should pull together on a rope of peace and welfare, because a land torn apart cannot survive." I have revised Holloway's translation in two places. In the first line of the passage I have translated Brunetto's "ponendo cura" as "taking stock" to maintain the notion of process suggested by the verbal adjective. Holloway's "in distress," by comparison, suggests a state of being. Also, whereas Holloway translated padre as "parents," I have translated it as "father" in order to preserve the important distincti on between the maternal order of nature and the paternal order of civilization.

(3.) Brunetto Latini, Li livres don tresor, ed. Francis J. Carmody (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947), trans. as The Book of the Treasure by Paul Barrette and Spurgeon Baldwin (New York: Garland, 1993).

(4.) See Skinner; also Randolph Stain and Loren Partridge, "The Republican Reginse of the Sala dei Nove in Siena, 1338-40," in Arts of Power: Three Halls of State in Italy, 1300-1600 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 35-36, 40-45.

(5.) Nicolai Rubinstein, "Political Ideals in Sienese Art: The Frescoes by Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Taddeo di Bartolo in the Palazzo Pubblico," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958): 179-207. The most strident objections to Skinner's thesis were presented by Frugoni, 189-93 (originally published as Una lontana citta: Sentimenti e immagini nel medioevo [Turin: Einaudi, 1983]).

(6.) Skinner, 32-33.

(7.) Ibid., 132.

(8.) The Tesoretto is an Italian verse translation of the more universally addressed Tresor, which was written in the then Lingua Franca, Provencal.

(9.) On the Tesoretto and the poetry of exile, see Elio Gabriel Costa, "Brunetto Latini between Boethius and Dante: The Tesoretto and the Medieval Allegorical Tradition," Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1974, chap. 3; also, more generally, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert: History and Allegory in the "Divine Comedy" (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), chap. 3; and Marianne Shapiro, "De Vulgari Eloquentia": Dante's Book of Exile (Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 1-46. On exile in late medieval Italy, see Randolph Stain, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

(10.) Among the comprehensive interpretations of the frescoes that cast the dancers in this light, see Chiara Frugoni, "Images Too Beautiful: Reality Perfected," in Frugoni, 153-59; and Jack M. Greenstein, "The Vision of Peace: Meaning and Representation in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Sala della Pace Cityscapes," Art History 11 (1988): 492-510, esp. 503. See also Max Seidel, "Hochzeitsikonographic im Trecento," pt. 2, "Die reitende Braut," Mittelungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 38 (1994): 21-35, esp. 31, 44 n. 88 (for further bibliography).

(11.) See, especially, Greenstein (as in n. 10), 492-510; and Skinner, 32-33.

(12.) Greenstein (as in n. 10), 502-3. Greenstein associates the Sienese dancers, as symbols of God-given harmony, with a literary commonplace that D. W. Robertson identified as the "New Dance." Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962), 125-34 On the symbolism of the dance in the pictorial imagery of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, see Robert L. McGrath, "The Dance as Pictorial Metaphor," Gazette des Beaux Arts, 6th ser., 89 (1977): 81-92.

(13.) On the problem of the dancers' costumes, see Bridgeman. Bridgeman observed that the costumes and comportment of the dancers are not those of chaste women as defined in contemporary sumptuary legislation. She suggested that the dancers' presence might be understood in the context of ritual but did not pursue this line of investigation, instead offering as her primary contribution the reidentification of the dancers as male giullari, or itinerant entertainers (245-46).

(14.) See Maria A. Ceppari Ridolfi and Patrizia Turrini, Il mulino della vanita: Lusso e cerimonie nella Siena medievale (Siena: Il Leccio, 1993); also Alessandro Lisini, "Le leggi prammatiche durante il Governo dei Nove (1287-1355)," Bulletino Senese di Storia Patria, n.s., 1 (1930): 40-70, esp. 53-55 n. 1, where Lisini gives the following very literal analysis of the relation between the Sienese sumptuary laws and Ambrogio's dancers: "There we see some dancing women, with dresses that are low cut and either painted or woven with animals, as was prohibited by these same laws. This suggests that they [Sienese women] had not yet refrained from such sumptuary habits."

(15.) Lisini (as in n. 14), 56.

(16.) Charles Dempsey, The Portrayal of Love: Botticelli's Primavera and Humanist Culture at the Time of Lorenzo the Magnificent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 76-77 n. 69. Dempsey, who is interested in the Sienese dancers primarily as evidence of the traditions of Tuscan folklore that informed the poetic and theatrical inventions associated with Lorenzo de' Medici at the end of the 15th century, refined his terminology in a more recent article, "Portraits and Masks in the Art of Lorenzo de' Medici, Botticelli, and Politian's Stanze per la Giostra," Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 1-42, esp. 14-17, where he distinguishes between the Sienese dancers, who he calls "simple maidens," and the dancers in Jacopo de Sellaio's Triumph of Chastity (1480s). In this discussion Dempsey reserves the term ninfa for thoroughly integrated fictions like Sellaio's Petrarchan triumphs, in which "the habit" (not just the clothing) of the dancers is encompassed in that term. Here Dempsey aligns himself, at least p artially, with Aby Warburg's early studies of Florentine art in the age of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and particularly Warburg's description of the emergence from Burgundian costume of the all'antica spirit of Florentine art: "the antique butterfly has emerged from the Burgundian chrysalis: the dress flows free, like that of Victory itself; and a Medusa-winged headdress--a welcome aid to flight, for a nymph who dances on the air--has banished the empty ostentation of the hennin. This is the native idealism of grace in motion that Botticelli made into the noblest expressive resource of early Renaissance art"; Warburg, Die Erneuerung der heidnischen Anlike: Kulturwissenschaftliche Beitrage zur Geschichte der europaischen Renaissance, ed. Gertrud Bing (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1932), trans. as The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, by David Britt, introduction by Kurt W. Forster (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 1999), 169-83, esp. 176. On Warburg and the figure of the Flore ntine nymph, see Kurt Forster, esp. 21-28. As Forster explains, 21, "Warburg's fascination with the nymph ... emerges not just as a personal idee fixe but as an intuition of a force that really exists, albeit half-veiled behind transient phenomena." Dempsey, who has yet to define the subjective content of his engagement with Laurentian art, sees Warburg's nymph as an emblem for the fusion of Latinate and vernacular culture that motivated the poetic culture associated with Lorenzo's "court."

(17.) Bridgeman, 246-49.

(18.) Neither caterpillars nor dragonflies were common among contemporary woven textiles, real or fictive. For fictive silks in 14th-century Italian painting and the real textile patterns they reproduce, see Brigitte Klesse, Seidenstoffe in der italienischen Malerei des 14. Jahrhunderts (Bern: Abegg-Stiftung, 1967).

(19.) Bridgeman, 245-51; also Stella Mary Newton, Renaissance Theatre Costume and the Sense of the Historic Past (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1975), 100. Newton refers to the record of a Florentine brigata in 1421, which describes their livery as having sleeves embroidered all over with grasshoppers.

(20.) Giovanni Villani, Cronica (a miglior lezione ridotta coll'aiuto de'testi a penna), bk. 7, chap. 132 (1823; reprint, Rome: Multigrafica, 1980). Several representations of Florence transformed by festive rites are to be found in the Cronica. This one appears as part of Villani's description of the festivities that followed the Florentine victory in the Battle of Campaldino in 1289.

(21.) Jonathan J.G. Alexander, "Dancing in the Streets," in Essays in Honor of Lilian M.C. Randall, special issue of Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 54 (1996): 147-62, esp. 148-50.

(22.) Seidel (as in n. 10), 21-35.

(23.) Frugoni, 153-59; also C. Jean Campbell, The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 196, 260 nn. 10, 11.

(24.) The point has been made by Charles de la Ronciere, "Tuscan Nobles on the Eve of the Renaissance," in A History of Private Life: Revelations of the Medieval World, ed. Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 242; also, Dempsey, 1992 (as in n. 16), 76-77 n. 69.

(25.) Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (1980; reprint, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 216.

(26.) On the relation between mythmaking and poetic remembrance in Boccaccio's works, see Thomas Hyde, "Boccaccio: The Genealogies of Myth," Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 100 (1985): 737-45; also Stone, 123-40.

(27.) Jeremiah Reedy, introduction to Boccaccio in Defense of Poetry (Genealogiae deorum gentilium liber XIV), ed. Jeremiah Reedy (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1978), 3-4.

(28.) Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 258-60.

(29.) See Uta Feldges-Henning, "The Pictorial Programme of the Sala della Pace: A New Interpretation," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 35 (1972): 145-62, esp. 154-55. Following Feldges-Henning, who first introduced the problem of sumptuary legislation with relation to the Sienese dancers, recent scholarship on the frescoes tends to cite the legislation banning dancing in public spaces to prove that their presence cannot be taken as a reflection of reality. Against what is usually construed as an idealized but relatively realistic mirror of life in a late medieval commune, the dancers have become transparent and fundamentally nonrealistic symbols of harmony. The argument is succinctly presented by Frugoni, 162: "A statute of the city of Siena prohibited dancing in the streets, and the existence of this prohibition leads us to realize that the dance of the girls depicted by the artist is not meant to be a real episode, but rather a symbolic figure. ..." Following this general line of reasoning R andolph Starn went so far as to call the dancers "textual surrogates"; in Starn and Partridge (as in n. 4), 49-51. Even Jonathan Alexander, who recognized a potentially positive value in their eroticism, still hesitated in final analysis. Picking up on Bridgeman's suggestion that the dancers' sexually transgressive dress and erotic activities characterize them as giullari, or itinerant male entertainers (see n. 13 above), Alexander drew the following conclusion: "The Sienese dancers, if they are indeed giullari, are interesting, as they stand in an ambiguous position relative to both status and gender. This may be a prophylactic warding-off of sexual transgression by parody. Or the dangerous aspects of dance may be being shifted onto the shoulders of outcasts"; Alexander (as in n. 21), 153.

(30.) One of Dante's 14th-century commentators neatly defined a larva as "a kind of clothing that covers the wearer in such a manner that it is impossible to distinguish the nature of the beast." See Bruno Basile's entry on the term larva in the Enciclopedia Dantesca (Rome: Instituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1973), vol. 4, 573.

(31.) Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, trans. Charles S. Singleton, vol. 3, Paradiso (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).

(32.) On Dante and the portrayal of the anima mundi, see Giuliana Carugati, "Retorica amorosa e verita in Dante: Il De causis e l'idea della donna nel Convivio," Dante Studies 112 (1994): 161-75; and idem, "Note su Beatrice: La visione mancata," Italica 68 (1991): 310-15. Carugati's project is to redress the dematerialization of the figure of the woman in the readings of Dante's poetry that follow Charles Singleton's reading of Beatrice as a pale and bloodless theological virtue. Carugati sees Dante's Beatrice as the poetic embodiment of the vital spirit of the world. Particularly important for the matter at hand is Carugati's explication of the erotic inflection of the word pace in a passage of Inferno (2.72). Carugati, "Quando amor fa sentir de la sua pace," ms, 2000. On Dante's Commedia and the poetic exploration of the idea of embodied spirit, see Marianne Shapiro, Dante and the Knot of Body and Soul (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), vii-xiv, 1-44. Dante, who was writing in the tradition of Boethius, shared in the representational goals of the 6th-century Neoplatonist as expressed in the Consolation of Philosophy. On Boethius's attempt to overcome the limits of representation and thereby share in the experience of cosmic order, see Elaine Scarry. "The External Referent: Cosmic Order; The Well Rounded Sphere: Cognition and Metaphysical Structure in Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy" (1980), in Resisting Representation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 143-80.

(33.) The word larva was adopted by modern taxonomists to describe the immature state of the insect on the basis of the idea that the immature wormlike form masks the "true image," or imago, which emerges in adulthood.

(34.) In modern Italian ninfa refers to the chrysalis, or pupal stage, of an insect that undergoes complete metamorphosis. This usage is similar to Pliny's. See Salvatore Battaglia, Grande dizionario della lingua italiana (Turin: Unione Tipografico Editrice Torinese, 1961-), vol. 11, 442, who traces the modern Italian term to Cristoforo Landino's vernacular translation of Pliny. In modern English the word nymph has a slightly different meaning, referring to the juvenile wingless state of an insect, like a dragonfly, that undergoes incomplete metamorphosis.

(35.) Pliny, Historia naturalis 11.16.48-49, trans. as Natural History by H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library, 2d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 461.

(36.) Kristeva, 287-96. On the medieval theory of signs descending from Augustine through Dante, see Marcia L. Colish, The Mirror of Language: A Study in the Medieval Theory of Knowledge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968). For a relevant discussion of form as a conveyor rather than a container of meaning, see Millicent Joy Marcus, An Allegory of Form: Literary Self-Conscionsness in the Decameron (Saratoga, Calif.: Anma Libri, 1979), 1-10.

(37.) In his treatise on vernacular eloquence, Dante associates the destruction of the Tower of Babel with the fragmentation of a unified natural language, for which the illustrious vernacular that is the elusive quarry of his hunt is a metaphor. See Marianne Shapiro's translation and critical analysis of Dante's De vulgari eloquentia (as in n. 9), 1-46, esp. 45, where Shapiro explicates Dante's hope for "transcendence through language." As she explains: "Both the Convivio and De vulgari eloquentia belong fundamentally to a perspective through which Dante's exile grows into a guiding metaphor. Framed in the topos of the Fall of Man and the end of Edenic language, the compensatory activity each work advocates takes the form of transcendence through language." See also Mazzotta (as in n. 9), 13, who points to "the interaction of city and language" as a persistent motif in Dante's imagination. As he explains it: "Babel, the literal city of language and the radical emblem of chaos, is, in Dante's typology, the an titype of the Incarnation. If the Incarnation is the account of the descent into humility of the Word as it bridges the gap between Heaven and Earth, Babel is the allegory of the confusion of tongues, the narrative of the failure of language to bridge that gap."

(38.) The passage from associative poetic thinking to classification in early modern scientific culture is neatly illustrated by Horst Bredekamp in his consideration of a wonderful excerpt describing a plant named Andromeda from Carolus Linnaeus's Tour of Lapland of 1735. Bredekamp, The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 1995), 88-90.

(39.) Hans Robert Jauss, "The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature," trans. Timothy Bahti, New Literary History 10 (1979): 181-227, esp. 182-83. The essay was first published as the introduction to a collection of articles written, in what Jauss retrospectively describes as a process discovery, between 1956 and 1976: Alteritat nod Modern itat der mittelalterlichen Literatur (Munich: W. Fink, 1977). Included in this volume is the work that substantially introduced Brunetto's works, particularly the Tesoretto, to modern scholarship. That essay, "Brunetto Latini als allegorischer Dichter," was first published in Formenwandel: Festschrift zur 65. Geburtstag von Paul Bockmann, ed. Walter Muller-Seidel and Wolfgang Preisendanz (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1964), 47-92.

(40.) Jauss, 1979 (as in is. 39), 182.

(41.) Ibid., 132.

(42.) Hans-Georg Gadamer, "The Historicity of Understanding," its Critical Sociology, ed. Paul Connerton (Harmobdsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), 117-33, cop. 123,

(43.) Jauss, 1979 (as in is. 39), 133.

(44.) Alain de Lille, De planctu naturae, prose 2, trans. as Time Plaint of Nature by James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1980), 111.

(45.) Boethius, De consolatione philosophiae, trans. as The Consolation of Philosophy by P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1099); also Howard Rollin Patels, The Tradition of Boethius: A Study of His Importance in Medieval Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), passim, esp. 87-123.

(46.) Its France, the various currents of naturalism reached their culmination in the 13th century with the Roman de la rose, a text that enjoyed widespread popularity in communal Tttscany. runetto Latinis Tesorello is only one of the many early Tuscan texts inspired by the Roman de la rose, Dante's Commedia being the most fatssous among them. II fiore, a text that has sometimes been attributed (but with no clear consensus) to the young Dante, is anotiser of the early Tuscats progeny of the Roman de la rose. See Aldo Scaglione, Nature and Love in the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963), chap. 2. Scaglione's groundbreakiing work on late medieval naturalism, which is informed by an older essentialist notion of "human nature," has been revisited and revisited in the work of Stone, esp. 26-29, 107-21.

(47.) Randolph Starn, in Stain and Partridge (as in n. 4). 12.

(48.) Brunetto's didactic poem found proximate sources of inspiration for its portrayal of nature not only its Alain's works but also in the Roman de la rose. His work also depends on Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy. See Costa (as in n. 9), passim.

(49.) Alain de Lille (as in n. 44), prose 1, meter 2.

(50.) Brunnetto (as in n. 2), w. 194-217.

(51.) Sometimes as appears to have been the case for the drawings it's the Laurenziana Tesoretta (Florence, Biblioteca Laurenziana ms Strozz. 146), illustrators looked to the established tradition of medieval Genesis illustrations for their model. See Modersohn, 60-61. The use of such a model may partly explain why the illustration of the advent of Nature its this manuscript includes all sorts of animals that neither Brunetto nor Alain mention by name. Grasshoppers, gnats, butterflies, and dragonflies are all discernible. Whatever its proximate source, the illustration stands as a precedent for Ambrogio's dancers in its inclusion of a variety of insects in the catalogue of nature's creations. The expansion and particularization of the catalogue of nature's creations in the illustrations of Brunetto's text is undoubtedly related to a growing encyclopedic culture of which Brunetto Latini was an important representative.

(52.) George Rowley, Ambrogio Lorenzetti, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), vol. 2, fig. 187. In the 14th century, when the frescoes were painted, the Casa Corboli its Asciano served a governmental function, probably as the residence of the podesta, the city's chief magistrate. On the frescoes of the Casa Corboli in general and the roundels replicating Ambrogio's seasons in the Sala dei Nove specifically, see Maria Monica Donato, "Aristoteles in Siena: Fresken eitses sienesischen Amtsgebaudes in Asciano," in Malerci and Stadkultur in der Dantezeit, ed. Hans Belting and Dieter Blume (Munich: Hirmer, 1989), 105-14. esp. 106 and fig. 40. For similar representations of Lady Nature, see Modersohn, figs. 185, 186.

(53.) Modersohn, 65-66.

(54.) See Mario Brusagli, La seta in Italia (Rome: Editalia, 1986), 96. Who takes the decoration of these dresses as evidence of the use of Syrian silks its Sienese clothing of the 14th century.

(55.) On Albertus's sources and his interest in the study of insect generation as a comparative field for human embryology, see Luke Demaitre and Anthony Travill, "Human Embryology and Development in the Works of Albertus Magnus," in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences, ed. James A. Weislseipl (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 405-40, esp. 405-12.

(56.) Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, bk. 26, see. 17. ed. Hermann Stadler, Beitrage zur Geschichte der Philosophie des Mittelalters, vols. 15. 16 (Munster: Aschendorffschse Verlagsuchhandlung, 1916-21): "Eruca vermis est longus, colore varius, multis pedibus curtis distensus. Hic vermis prima bombicum more et aranearum telas in extremitate arborum involvendo fluit, et ibi ova plurima reponit, et ex avis illis parvae erucae in principio verb proveninut. quae in angusto tecta subintrat, et a pareitibus intimis pendentes, duram circa se pellem contrahunt, pelle pilosa quam prius habuerunt exuta, et vivit vita quasi dormientis e sopiti animalis: et ex illa quasi ovali natura aliam formam volitilis accipiunt...."

(57.) Ibid., bk. 26, 24: "Hic erucae habet generationem. Nam prima vermis est, et foliis mori cibatus sericum facit bonum.... Hic vermis... circa se facit sericum croceum vel album: omnes enim alii colores in serico fiunt per artem. Intus autemn involutus in folliculo circa quad cot sericum, convertibur ad naturam ovalem et erumpit in volatile alatum et debile multo minus quam fuerat vermis...."

(58.) Hans Belting, "The New Role of Narrative in Public Painting of the Trecento: Historia and Allegory," in Pictorial Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ed. Herbert L. Kessler and Marianna Shreve Simpson, Studies in the History of Art, vol. 16 (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1985), 151-68. cap. 159-60.

(59.) Skinner, 12-15, 34-35.

(60.) For a discussion of the relation between natura and poesis in the late Middle Ages, see Stone, chap. 1.

(61.) On the silk industry of Lucca, see Donata Devoti, La seta: Tesori di mist antica arte lucchese; Produzione tessile a Lucca dal XIII al XVII secolo (Lucca: Maria Paccini Fazzi, 1989), 13-30. As Devoti explains, the raw material from which the lucchese silk was fabricated was imported from the Middle and Far East, and sometimes from Calabria. This material was transported in a distinctive form of package, a long, narrow bundle bound in a grid pattern with rope, called a torsella. Lest there be any doubt concerning mid-14th-century Siena's acquaintance with the silk industry, I would point out that three such torselli, complete with their merchant marks, appear as the cargo of the traders shown passing over the bridge in the lower right-hand corner of Ambrogio's depiction of the peaceful countryside. Marvelous details of this and other portions of the fresco cycle are reproduced in Enrico Castelnuovo, ed., Ambrogio Lorenzetti: It buon governo (Milan: Electa, 1995), 300, 310-11.

(62.) Although I am unable, at this point, to substantiate the observation on grounds other than formal analysis, I cannot resist pointing out that the serpentine pattern formed by the dancers on the predominantly rectilinear structure of the cityscape recalls the structure of a particular type of silk fabric (known as lampasso) in which a serpentine or otherwise undulating pattern, seemingly independent of the rectilinear ground, is woven into that ground with diagonal ligatures. See Donata Devoti, L'arte del tessuto in Europa (Milan: Bramante, 1974), 252-53, cat, no. 34.

(63.) For a related discussion of painted clothing as an affective metaphor, separable in that capacity from its illusionistic function of clothing a body, see Alison M. Kettering, "Ter Boinch's Ladies in Satin," Art History 16 (1993): 95-104, cap. 99-101.

(64.) Curt Sachs, World History of the Dance, trans. Bessie Schonberg (New York: W. W. Norton, 1933), 162-63, 272. On the pattern of the dance, see also Rowley (as in n. 52), vol. 1, 110-12; Pierfranco Moliterni, "Legere scribere et caistare sciebat et can tilenas et cantiones invenire: Musica e danza al tempo di Federico II," in Federico II: Immagine e potere, ed. Maria Stella Calo Mariani (Venice: Marsilia, 1995), 97-98. Both Rowley and Mohiterni identify Amabrogin's dance as a ridda, and Mohiterni describes its characteristics: "The group dance was made up of a chain of dancers that opened and closed at the sound of the voice and the instruments, while at the head of the chain was a conductor who led the circuit."

(65.) On the dance as a metaphor for remembrance, see Carruthers (as in n. 28), 62.

(66.) Boccaccio. Boccaccia's romance has been translated as The Nymph of Fiesole Daniel J. Donna (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960), but the translations of specific passages I have provided in the body of the text are may own. For a general introduction to the text, in addition to the one provided by Forni in his edition, see Natalino Sapegno, Storia letterari d'Italia: Il trecento (Milan: Vallardi, 1955), 337-48.

(67.) Boccaccio, octave 22.

(68.) Ibid., octaves 193-257.

(69.) Ibid., octaves 211-12.

(70.) Andre Gide, Journal 1889-1939 (Paris: Gallimard, Pleiade, 1948), 41, as quoted by Lucien Dallenbach in The Mirror its the Text, trans. Jeremy Whiteley with Emmna Hughes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), 7.

(71.) Ibid., 7-19, esp. 8. Dallenbach explains that the word abyme was borrowed from the technical terminology of 19th-century heraldry, where it referred to a small replica of a shield located at its heart, or abyme.

(72.) Ibid., 7.

(73.) Reflexivity has been identified as a structural principle of the vernacular inscriptions that accompany and explicate the visual imagery. See Furio Brugnolo, "Le iscrizioni in volgare: Testo e commento," in Castelnuovo (as in ins. 61), 381-91, esp. 381-86. Brugnolo characterized the series of the syntactic and lexical correspondences he found in the inscriptions as "almost a game of mirrors." Considered as a whole, the inscriptions constitute, in Brugnolo's estimation, a kind of double-sided canzone.

(74.) Rosamond Tuve, "Notes on the Virtues and Vices," pt. 1, "Two Fifteenth-Century Lines of Dependence on the Thirteenth and Twelfth Centuries," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 26 (1963): 264-303, esp. 290-95. The larger goal of this article, despite its modest title, was to rescue the type of allegorical diagram we see in the Sienese frescoes from the eclipse it had suffered under a romantic assumption of the value of art. As Tuve explained (295): "It is designedly and necessarily static--now a word used chiefly to condemn. No one in the times to which such imagery belongs would have believed in our critical assumption, that art has place only for drama, none for exposition. Such images have a close relation, even sometimes a need, of the written word, which seems to us reprehensible. It need not 'start with the ideas'--another critical cliche used for condemnation--although some eras have thought this a very intelligent place to start; it does examine and relate ideas, but one of its excit ements can be to generate them."

(75.) Skinner, 32-33.

(76.) Frugoni, 192-93.

(77.) On the popularity of the Achilleid in the Middle Ages, see Paul M. Clogan, introduction to The Medieval Achilleid of Statius (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 1-9.

(78.) Stacius (Statius), Achilleidos, bk. 2, lines 283-317, in Clogan (as in n. 77). Here and below, I cite Clogan's edition as representative of the state in which the text was generally known in the late Middle Ages.

(79.) Ibid., bk. 2, lines 325-37.

(80.) This episode of the Achilleid undoubtedly stands behind a similar episode in Boccaccio's Ninfale, discussed at length below.

(81.) The inscription that now reads "Timor" probably once read "Pavor." Both timor and pavor may be translated with the English word fear, but pavor, like the modern Italian paura, also indicates the physical affect of fear. The faint shadow of the original letters is still legible. See Brugnolo (as in n. 73), 381.

(82.) Maria Rosa Menocal, Shards of Love: Exile and the Origins of the Lyric (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994), 179. In the passage I quote, Menocal is speaking generally of the power of the lyric, and specifically of Francesco Petrarca's love-hate relation to the vernacular love lyric and the fragmentation of the self that is characteristic of that medium: "It is in some measure ironic, of course, since the healing of the fractured self that Petrarch so lusted after, that so obsessed him--that made him fear the medieval lyric and invent the Renaissance narrative of continuity--is fleetingly, but powerfully to be had in the pantheistic moments of the dance, the song, the communion among all selves, all the birds, all the lovers, all the voices, when you can't tell, when it doesn't matter."

(83.) Giambattista Marino, Adone, canto 20, octave 94, ed. Marzio Pieri (Rome: Laterza, 1977): "Sotto la treccia delle brace alzate / per filo or quella, or quest il capo abbassa / e torcendo le mani inanellate / altra se n'esce, altra sottentra e passa." I owe the analogy between Ambrogio's dancers and those in Marino's Adone to Sachs (as in n. 64), 162.

(84.) See J. M. Snyder, "The Web of Song: Weaving Images in Homer and the Lyric Poets," Classical Journal 76 (1981): 193-96.

(85.) On Marino's poetry and its relation to the visual arts of his own day, see Elizabeth Cropper, "The Petrifying Art: Marino's Poetry and Caravaggio," Metropolitan Museum Journal 26 (1991): 193-212. Although she is concerned with a later period, and with an art that was both produced and consumed as stunning artifice, Cropper is dealing with a problem that is similar to mine. In attempting to replace an iconographic reading of Caravaggio's paintings with a lyric one, Cropper opened to view a type of art that in addressing the spectator "as lover or co-conspirator, belongs to the largely uncharted tradition of representation as an affective relationship in the Renaissance" (208).

(86.) Kristeva, 267-79.

(87.) John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space, 3d ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1987), 93-99.

(88.) See, for a similar reading of White, Christine Milner, "The Pattern of the Dance in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Peaceful City," Bullettino Senese di Storia Patria 90 (1992): 232-48, esp. 237-38. In Milner's words, "The central image of the dance--that ritual which seems both to embody and generate the life of Ambrogio's ideal Siena--provides a pivotal point for the whole east wall design, a nexus where 'form' and 'content' are not only at their most complex but also at their most unified." Although I agree with this aspect of her argument, her subsequent discussion takes a different direction from mine, searching--by analogy with the dance of blessed souls figured as lights in Dante's Paradiso (28.73-81, 88-93)--for the symbolic significance of the letter S she finds traced out in the pattern of the dance.

(89.) Rowley (as in n. 52), vol. 1, 110-12.

(90.) Homer, Iliad, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977).

(91.) Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), esp. 42-113.

(92.) Campbell (as in n. 23), chaps. 2, 3.

(93.) C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness: Civilizing Trends and the Formation of Courtly Ideals, 939-1210 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), passim, esp. 121.

(94.) Trexler (as in n. 25), esp. 279-330. It is significant, as Trexler points Out, that members of the old aristocracy, while frequently banished from the city and/or denied a place in its government, were typically recruited, in their capacity as noble bodies, for diplomatic missions.

(95.) On Folgore's poetry in general, see Giovanni Caravaggi, Folgore do San Gimignano (Milan: Ceschina, 1960); also the essays collected in Michelangelo Picone, ed., Il Giuoco della vita bella: Folgore do San Gimignano (S. Gimignano: Comune di S. Gimignano, 1988).

(96.) Maria Pont, "Sonnetti per l'armamento di un cavaliere," in Picone (as in n. 95), 51-63.

(97.) Folgore da San Gimignano, "Prodezza," lines 1-4, in Sonetti, ed. Giovanni Caravaggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1965): "Ecco Prodezza, che tosto lo spoglia / e dice: 'Amico, e' convien che tu mudi, / per cio ch'i' vo' veder li uomini nun / e vo' che sappi non abbo altra voglia...'"

(98.) Folgore: "Giunge Allegrezza con letizia e festa, / tutta fiorita che pare un rosaio; / do lin, do seta, di drappo e di vaio / allor Ii porta bellissima vesta, / vetta, cappuccio con ghirlanda in testa, / e si adorno l'ha che pare un maio; / con tanta gente che trema i1 solaio; / allor si face lopra manifesta. / E ritto l'ha in calze ed in pianelle, / borsa, cintura inorata d'argento, / che stanno sotto la leggiadra pelle; / cantar, sonando ciascuno stormento, / mostrando lui a donne ed a donzelle / e quanti sono a questo assembramento."

(99.) On the Sienese legislation prohibiting this variety of footwear, see Ridolfi and Turrini (as in n. 14), 94. For the objections of legislators and moralists to this type of footwear, see Diane Owen Hughes, "Regulating Women's Fashion," A History of Women in the West, vol. 2, Silences of the Middle Ages, ed. Christiane Kiapiseb-Zuber (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Belknap Press, 1992), 148-49.

(100.) Note for example the festive headgear of Folgore's young knight, which includes not just a fillet but also, redundantly, a hood and a garland.

(101.) Bridgeman.

(102.) For a general discussion of such rituals and their evolution in late medieval and early Renaissance Florence, see Trexler (as in n. 25), 215-78, esp. 215-18. For ceremonies of knighthood in late medieval Siena and their attendant splendor, see Daniel Waley, Siena and the Sienese in the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); also Campbell (as in n. 23), 78, where I discuss the implications of Waley's observations for the understanding of the relationship between courtly ceremonies and communal authority.

(103.) Villani (as inn. 20), bk. 7, chap. 89.

(104.) For a concise discussion of the transformation of these Provencal themes in the poetry of Folgore da San Gimignano, with the relevant bibliography, see Pont (as in n. 96), 55-56, 63 n. 10.

(105.) See Ernst Kantorowicz, "The 'King's Advent' and the Enigmatic Panels in the Doors of Santa Sabina," Art Bulletin 26 (1944): 207-31, esp. 210.

(106.) In this episode we see a significant departure by Boccaccio from the model episode in Statius's Achilleid. Statius's Achilles does not engage in the kind of coy striptease that Boccaccio's Mrico undertakes as a prelude to the rape of Mensola. In both Statius's poem and Boccaccio's, the rape inaugurated the passage from a pastoral dreamworld into historical action, but Status had not thoroughly staged the acts of masking and unmasking as Boccaccio would do.

(107.) Boccaccio, octaves 436-44. See Sapegno (as in n. 66), 346; and Scaglione (as in n. 46), 121, 206 n. 42.

(108.) Marga Cottino-Jones, "The City-Country Conflict in the Decameron," Studi sul Boccaccio 8 (1974): 183. On the social function of the healing process represented in the Decameron, see also Marcus (as in n. 36), 110-25.

Frequently Cited Sources

Boccaccio, Giovanni, Ninfale fiesolano, ed. Pier Massimo Forni (Milan: Mursia, (1991).

Bridgeman, Jane, Ambrogio Lorenzetti's Dancing 'Maidens': A Case of Mistaken Identify," Apollo 133 (1991): 245-51.

Frugoni, Chiara, A Distant City: Images of Urban Experience in the Medieval World, trans. W. McCuaig (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Kristeva, Julia, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

Modersohn, Mechthild, Natura als Gottin im Mittelalter: Ikonographische Studien zu Darstellungen der personifizierten Natur (Berlin: Akademie, 1997).

Skinner, Quentine, "Ambrogio Lorenzetti: The Artist as Political Philosopher," Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 1-56.

Stone, Gregory 13., The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages: On Boccaccio's Poetaphysics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998).

C. Jean Campbell, associate professor of Renaissance art history, explores relations between visual art, poetry and urban culture in fourteenth-century Tuscany in her research. She is the author of The Game of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano (Princeton, 1997) [Art History Department, Emory University, Atlanta, Ga. 30322].

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