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The lost wheel map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Art Bulletin, The, June, 1996 by Marcia Kupfer
The 1980-81 restoration campaign provided incontrovertible physical evidence that the circle imprinted on the Guidoriccio wall was occupied by a revolving disk.(23) As specified in the eighteenth-century sources, it indeed turned on a single pivot, or stylus, by which it was affixed to the wall. The height at which the disk was installed suggests that its rotation could be effected manually from the floor. In his Lettere Senese of 1785, della Valle echoes Pecci (1730, 1752) and Faluschi (1784) in reporting "un avvanzo molto lacero di carta topografica," but adds that it was painted "in tela, di cui ora non resta che qualche piccolo cencio."(24) Evidently eighteenth-century witnesses had before them merely a scrap of the map. The topographic depiction of the Sienese state then visible could thus have been but a small fragment of the whole.
The cumulative evidence leads to the conclusion that the rotating disk beneath the Guidoriccio was Lorenzetti's Mappamondo. In contrast, the argument put forward by Moran and Mallory is rather weak. They believe that the rings scratched into the intonaco of the "New Town" and circular border in fresco correspond not to the Lorenzetti work of 1345, but rather to a representation of the Sienese state commissioned in 1424. Based on his reading of a mid-fifteenth-century inventory of mobile objects in the Palazzo, Moran situates the Lorenzetti instead in the Sala dei Nove.(25) This double proposition strikes me as a desperate attempt at obfuscation for the sake of sustaining an attack on the traditional attribution of the Guidoriccio.
A commission for the representation of the Sienese state was contemplated in December 1424, but its terms could suggest a series of topographic views as easily as a map, and the place of display is unclear: "Deliberatum etiam quod pingantur sive designentur ad bazeum omnes terre acquisite et recuperate tempore present is regiminis in sala balistarum, sive in sala magna Consilii, prout alias per eos deliberabitur" (It was also deliberated that all lands acquired and retaken at the time of the present government be painted or represented at/on [?] in the Sala delle Balestre, or the great hall of the Council, accordingly others [other lands] as it will be deliberated by them).(26)
Was this image of the Sienese state executed? In any event, it could not have replaced the Mappamondo from which Saint Bernardino recalled an image of Italy, a work still visible in 1427. Moreover, the inventory of mobile objects cited by Moran merely places the Mappamondo in a "sala delle balestre" of which there were two on the second floor. Given the explicit distinction Tizio makes between the room of the map's location and the Sala della Pace, Moran's interpretation of the ambiguously worded inventory seems gratuitous. Thus, despite Moran's and Mallory's objections, the scholarly consensus concerning the installation of the Mappamondo is not seriously challenged.
However, the material of the work's support has remained a matter of confusion.(27) Many scholars have assumed that Lorenzetti's work of 1345 was painted either on panel or vellum.(28) As a result, some have brushed aside della Valle's statement that the map was painted on cloth; others have pointed to his remark as an indication that the Lorenzetti was eventually replaced with a later work. Yet there is no good reason to doubt della Valle.
