The lost wheel map of Ambrogio Lorenzetti

A modified version of Bargagli Petrucci's idea, involving the representation of the universe on a single disk, could nevertheless still be contemplated. Inclusion of cosmological material at the outer rim of the map may gain support from the restoration document of 1393. The use of blue, for which the painters were reimbursed a considerable sum, could be taken to indicate that the heavens were depicted on the portion of the disk most susceptible early on to damage from manual rotation.(51) As the map was cut back over time, this component would have no longer been visible in the eighteenth century. Alternatively, the painting could originally have portrayed the terrestrial world alone. The blue employed in the 1393 restoration could, after all, just as easily have gone for the depiction of ocean and seas.

With or without some iconographic allusion to the cosmos, Lorenzetti's map presented an image of the earthly world that was immediately familiar to its viewers. Saint Bernardino spoke of Italy, Ghiberti of la terra abitabile. Eighteenth-century writers saw on the extant fragment of the cloth disk the topography of the Sienese state. If the city and its contado could still be seen on the remaining interior portion of the disk surrounding the pivot, then the republic must have been positioned toward, though not necessarily exactly at, the center of the map. It is occasionally assumed that mappamondo and carta topografica are incompatible, indeed mutually exclusive, terms; the eighteenth-century description is then either taken to refer to a later replacement, judged the more reliable guide to the nature of the lost image, or discounted altogether.(52) However, the initial premise underlying these conclusions is by no means valid. All the elements gleaned from the written sources could have been integrated in a single, and what is more, revolving map.

Some scholars have suggested that Lorenzetti's Mappamondo may have served as the model for schematic world maps by quattrocento artists known to be dependent on the trecento master.(53) Examples abound in the Palazzo Pubblico itself. Taddeo di Bartolo painted mappaemundi as attributes of Justice in the Cappella (1406-7) and of Justice and Religion in the Antecappella (1414) [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 3-7 OMITTED].(54) Two terrestrial globes and a cosmological diagram containing a world map illustrate the Creed in Domenico di Niccolo's intarsia choir stalls (1415-28) in the Cappella.(55) Later painters placed a world map beneath the feet of Saint Bernardino in portrait icons of the saint in glory (e.g., Fig. 8), a convention adopted by Sano di Pietro for his fresco in the Sala del Mappamondo [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 9 OMITTED].(56)