Decline
Siena rivaled Florence in the arts throughout the 13th and 14th centuries: the important late medieval painter Duccio (1253–1319) was a Sienese, but worked across the peninsula, and the mural of "Good Government" by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Pubblico, or town hall, is a magnificent example of late-Medieval/early Renaissance art as well as a representation of the utopia of urban society as conceived during that period. Siena was devastated by the Black Death of 1348, and also suffered from ill-fated financial enterprises. In 1355, with the arrival of Charles IV of Luxembourg in the city, the population rose and suppressed the government of the Nove (Nine), establishing that Dodici (Twelve) nobles assisted by a council with a popular majority. This was also short-lived, being replaced by the Quindici (Fifteen) reformers in 1385, the Dieci (Ten, 1386–1387), Undici (Eleven, 1388–1398) and Twelve Priors (1398–1399) who, in the end, gave the city's seigniory to Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Milan in order to defend it from the Florentine expansionism.
In 1404 the Visconti were expelled and a government of Ten Priors established, in alliance with Florence against King Ladislaus of Naples. With the election of the Sienese Pius II as Pope, the Piccolomini and other noble families were allowed to return to the government, but after his death the control returned into popular hands.
Read more about this topic: Republic Of Siena
Famous quotes containing the word decline:
“But only that soul can be my friend which I encounter on the line of my own march, that soul to which I do not decline, and which does not decline me, but, native of the same celestial latitude, repeats in its own all my experience.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The chief misery of the decline of the faculties, and a main cause of the irritability that often goes with it, is evidently the isolation, the lack of customary appreciation and influence, which only the rarest tact and thoughtfulness on the part of others can alleviate.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“I rather think the cinema will die. Look at the energy being exerted to revive it—yesterday it was color, today three dimensions. I don’t give it forty years more. Witness the decline of conversation. Only the Irish have remained incomparable conversationalists, maybe because technical progress has passed them by.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)