ages the same city might more than once during one lifetime present
in the vivid colours of reality the two contrasted pictures.[2]

[1] It is probable that the firm Ghibelline sympathies of
the Sienese people for the Empire were allegorised in this
figure; so that the fresco represented by form and colour
what Dante had expressed in his treatise 'De Monarchia.'
Among the virtues who attend him, Peace distinguishes
herself by rare and very remarkable beauty. She is dressed
in white and crowned with olive; the folds of her drapery,
clinging to the delicately modelled limbs beneath,
irresistibly suggest a classic statue. So again does the
monumental pose of her dignified, reclining, and yet
languid figure. It seems not unreasonable to believe that
Lorenzetti copied Peace from the antique Venus which
belonged to the Sienese, and which in a fit of
superstitious malice they subsequently destroyed and
buried in Florentine soil.

[2] Siena, of all Italian cities, was most subject to
revolutions. Comines describes it as a city which 'se
gouverne plus follement que ville d'Italie.' Varchi calls
it 'un guazzabuglio ed una confusione di repubbliche
piuttosto che bene ordinata e instituta repubblica.' See
my 'Age of the Despots' (_Renaissance in Italy_, Part I.),
pp. 141, 554, for some account of the Sienese
constitution, and of the feuds and reconciliations of the
burghers.

Quitting the Palazzo, and threading narrow streets, paved with brick
and overshadowed with huge empty palaces, we reach the highest of
the three hills on which Siena stands, and see before us the Duomo.
This church is the most purely Gothic of all Italian cathedrals
designed by national architects. Together with that of Orvieto, it
stands to show what the unassisted genius of the Italians could
produce, when under the empire of mediaeval Christianity and before
the advent of the neopagan spirit. It is built wholly of marble, and
overlaid, inside and out, with florid ornaments of exquisite beauty.
There are no flying buttresses, no pinnacles, no deep and fretted
doorways, such as form the charm of French and English architecture;
but instead of this, the lines of parti-coloured marbles, the
scrolls and wreaths of foliage, the mosaics and the frescoes which
meet the eye in every direction, satisfy our sense of variety,
producing most agreeable combinations of b