What Siena knew that we forgot: On painting, power, and the politics of gold

By Alastair JR Ball

Like many people with an unhealthy obsession with both medieval history and modern politics, I found myself one sunny bank holiday Monday at Siena: The Rise of Painting at the National Gallery, and promptly lost my mind; ecstatically and in gold leaf.

Siena in the 13th and 14th centuries was not just a picturesque hill town with good wine. It was a city-state that sat like a brooch on the shoulder of the Silk Road, a cultural and political hub in an age when most of Europe thought that a drafty keep was the height of sophistication.

Its government, astonishingly for the time, was a semi-representative oligarchy - the Council of the Nine - who governed the city and brought stability in a time of upheaval across Europe. It was civic, sophisticated, and very interested in painting.

The not so different Mediaeval world

What struck me, wandering between crucifixions and Madonnas, is the similarities between their world and ours. Yes, it was soaked in religious devotion and occasionally in actual blood, and yes, their understanding of perspective in painting was lacking - giving the paintings that odd distinctively Mediaeval look - but they got something we don’t: they understood that power is not just violence. It’s image.

Sienese painting was political, not just in the banal sense that all art is political, but in the active, scheming, soft-power sense. Art was a tool of government. Simone Martini wasn’t just painting saints, he was helping invent the modern state.

Take The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine from the circle of Simone Martini. Gold. Everywhere. Gold that defies earthly logic, applied in ways that made me squint and think of offshore accounts. The point was not realism, but symbolism. Holiness gleamed. Power radiated. Saints wore Sienese silk. Catherine marries Christ, yes, but she does so wearing the high fashion of 14th-century Tuscany. This isn’t a history painting; it’s a political broadcast.

The modern political playbook

Look at The Marriage of the Virgin by Gregorio di Cecco di Luca. Mary and Joseph are getting hitched in a building that looks like the Palazzo Pubblico, again wearing the fashion of Siena at the time and not ancient Judah. They are dressed like wealthy merchants' children. This is not just anachronism; this is ideology. Siena was claiming spiritual legitimacy by inserting itself into the biblical story.

This is the same playbook as modern political spin doctors who want nothing more than to see a politician posing in a hard hat next to the construction site of some vast infrastructure project.

The cusp of the Renaissance

What’s more, this exhibition reminds us that they understood representation, both in painting and politics, as something revolutionary. Before the invention of linear perspective, these painters still reached toward a representation of the world that would be well understood at the time.

Madonna del Latte by Ambrogio Lorenzetti shows the Virgin nursing, not enthroned in majesty but as a mother, vulnerable and earthy. There is tenderness. Humanity. This is proto-humanism with gold halos.

Siena was on the cusp of the Renaissance, not just artistically, but civically. Its painters were working at the same time as Petrarch was inventing the idea of the individual. Martini even knew him personally. Imagine that, your local council commissioning art that philosophically aligns with the birth of humanism. Meanwhile, ours are still trying to get a recycling bin that works.

Not by sword, but by triptych

Then there’s the Avignon connection. When the papacy decamped from Rome to France, like a teenage runaway to a cooler friend’s house, it took the prestige of Sienese painting with it. Cardinals, kings, and power-hungry prelates all encountered this new kind of image-making, gilded, emotive, structured like a sermon but glowing like a Gucci ad. They copied it. They spread it. This was international influence, not by sword, but by triptych.

It made me think, uncomfortably, about how little regard we have now for the unquantifiable power of art. In our era of growth forecasts and spending reviews, we forget that civic pride, national identity, and even foreign policy can hinge on culture. Siena didn’t. They used painting like a scalpel; delicate, beautiful, and potentially fatal. We, on the other hand, treat it like an optional extra, to be cut when budgets tighten. Soft power isn’t in the balance sheet, so it doesn’t count. Until it does.

Painting in gold

The medieval world, for all its plagues, superstition, and saints with implausibly dainty hands, had a clearer understanding of how power works than we do. It knew that violence is only part of the story. Influence - the kind that lives in churches, in galleries, on screens - is subtler and stronger. It leaves fewer bruises, but longer memories.

So yes, their world was brutal, but at least they looked it in the face. If you think our world is less violent, then ask the people of Gaza what they think. We hide our brutality behind euphemisms and bury it in the endless scroll of social media. Siena painted theirs in gold.

Dancing on Advertisements

By Alastair JR Ball

I remember walking through Tottenham last winter, skint and raw-nerves, watching the world get brighter and louder with adverts I couldn’t afford to believe in. New iPhones, luxury toothpaste, craft beer at £8 a pint. All of it screaming in HD colour across walls, windows, and screens, promising salvation, if I just bought the right thing. I was meant to be grateful for these offers, but instead I felt like I was being hunted.

Nothing about their version of life made sense to me. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to optimise, lose weight, or pretend I was living my best life on Instagram.

The graffiti, still visible down side streets off Tottenham High Road, once a symbol of resistance, felt neutered too. Stripped of teeth and commodified; if the zeal with which a Banksy was removed from the wall of a Wood Green Poundland is anything to go by. Most likely it’s in a private art collection now or is hanging in a Mayfair art gallery, framed and flogged to property developers as “urban aesthetic.”

Liberation in the form of a sharpie

That’s when I found Solarpunk Social at The Post Bar, where I was handed a sharpie and some plants, then shown adverts freshly liberated from the glass of a London bus stop. It was joyful. It was political theatre. It was exactly what I needed.

Graffiti and subvertising are usually dismissed as vandalism. Even the more generous critics relegate them to “street art,” as if the spray can is somehow inferior to the oil brush. Or it’s only praised when it becomes worth a huge amount of money, like the Banksy liberated from a Poundland Wall to generate profit for someone somewhere.

What if, instead of seeing graffiti as a static image, we saw it as performance? What if the street isn’t just a gallery, but a stage, and every sprayed line, every hacked billboard, a fleeting act in a radical theatre of resistance? That’s the possibility that subvertising offers.

Defacing as a political gesture

Subvertising, short for “subversive advertising”, is the street’s remix culture. Think of it as cultural detournement: Nike slogans reworded to critique sweatshops, oil companies’ greenwashing torn apart with biting counter-texts, McDonald’s golden arches twisted into protest symbols. It’s an art of interruption, of jamming the signal.

Unlike sanctioned murals or publicly funded street art festivals, subvertising is deliberately illegal, unauthorised, and often anonymous. Its power lies in what it interrupts: the endless stream of ads that tell us who we should be, what we should buy, and how we should feel about our lack of it.

It’s the art of culture jamming: turning “Have it Your Way” into “Have Nothing, Be Grateful.” It’s resistance in Helvetica Bold.

Billboards lie. Spray paint doesn’t

Graffiti and subvertising reclaim the visual commons. They’re not just images, they’re insurgencies. Every tag is a refusal. Every defaced billboard is a vote of no confidence in the capitalism of the eye. These are performed critiques: urgent, embodied, and defiant.

Commercial messages are everywhere. We don’t consent to them. We don’t vote for them. Yet they haunt our commutes, leer at us from bus shelters, shout at us from phone screens. Subvertising answers back.

The graffiti artist as performer

Subvertising doesn’t happen in studios. It’s born in shadows, alleys, train yards. It’s as much choreography as creativity, part ninja, part dancer. There’s the scouting, the route planning, the escape map. The timing is precise. The adrenaline is real. The risk is the point.

This is not unlike performance art. Marina Abramović may have stared for hours, but hanging off scaffolding at 3am with a police van circling by seems more daring and more confrontational.

Subvertising is graffiti’s punk sibling: angry, quick, uninvited. A visual insurrection. A performed critique. Not just the image, but the body involved in putting it there, climbing, sneaking, pasting, running. It is live art made in alleyways and scaffolded silence. No stage, no script, just a flash of intention before the cleaners come.

Witness and audience

That night at The Post Bar, I realised how much I’d been craving something physical. Something collective. Not just reading radical theory on the tube while the world burns, but being in the mess with other people. Holding hands. Laughing. Risking. Making something together and then stomping on it with muddy boots.

It reminded me of performance art, not the solemn chin-stroking kind, but the raw, sweaty kind. Joy as an act of resistance, like the Idles album said. The act itself was the message. The audience? Whoever had popped into The Post Bar that night, lured by craft beer and reggae provided by Street Light Sound System.

Then, when the adverts went back out into the world freshly remixed and placed back in their protective glass the audience became whoever clocked the weird collage above the McDonald’s ad and did a double take. The commuter. The bus driver. The stoned teenager, walking home at 3am. Like all the best art, it was fleeting. It might be gone tomorrow. That’s what makes it matter.

This is not for Sotheby’s

Unlike the rarefied hush of the gallery, subvertising’s audience is unpredictable. It’s the morning jogger, the night bus driver, the teenager on her phone at the zebra crossing. It’s the pigeon.

This is the street artist's great democratic risk and reward: anyone can see it, and anyone can ignore it. However, those who do see it? They become part of it. Reactions, laughter, disgust, Instagram posts, arrests, are all part of the artwork’s performance arc.

Like any good live act, subvertising’s lifespan is short. A wall might be buffed clean in an hour. A remixed ad placed back in a bus shelter may be taken down by the council before sunrise. Or it might go viral before disappearing. Subvertising lives, and dies, on borrowed time.

Dancing on advertisements

We didn’t do it alone. Solarpunk Social at The Post Bar and the London School of Solarpunk are full of people who think the future can still be beautiful. We know we need new myths, new dreams, and new ways of being together in the city. The Post Bar is one of the last places where this kind of thing can happen, where rebellion can be tender, queer, funny, and covered in biodegradable glue.

After we had remixed the adverts, they served as an impromptu dance floor as we bopped the night away to reggae and dub. The walls of bus stops had become our floor. This was an act of personal liberation. I had honestly never danced on an advert before that night.

The street is still a stage. It’s where graffiti brought down regimes during the Arab Spring. It’s where Black Lives Matter murals carved power into pavement. It’s where Brandalism turned Coke slogans into climate warnings. This isn’t art about politics. This is politics. Not in galleries, but in gutters. Not for sale, but for sharing.

The street as a site of resistance

Throughout history, graffiti has flourished in moments of upheaval. In Cairo’s Tahrir Square, walls bloomed with revolutionary stencils. In Minneapolis, George Floyd’s face became a muraled martyr. In London, Solarpunk Social do their part to stand up to the oppressive tide of late-stage capitalism.

These works of art are not decorative. They are declarative. They refuse commodification. They ask not to be bought, but to be felt.

Unlike most gallery art, they don’t whisper. They scream. They exist in defiance of permission. They resist the sanitised, privatised, corporatised aesthetics of urban life.

The message in the mess

They are art, yes, but they are also acts. At The Post Bar we weren't creating masterpieces. We were becoming art. Temporary, illegal, unforgettable.

Subvertising isn’t just a visual practice. It’s a temporal one. It happens. Then it vanishes. It leaves behind a question. Not just “what does it say?” but “who did it speak to? Who did it challenge?”

That night, we left The Post Bar giggling, tipsy, looking back at the adverts we’d re-written. There was glue on our hands and slogans under our boots. It was messy. It meant something.

Escaping the bland commercial world

I felt rejuvenated from connecting with people instead of doom scrolling past adverts. It was exciting to be part of an act of resistance to the bland commercial world that a few hours earlier had seemed inescapable.

Graffiti and subvertising are verbs. Things you do. Things that interrupt, provoke, delight. So next time you see a billboard, don’t just ask what it says. Ask who it’s speaking to. Ask who made it. Ask what it’s stealing from you, and how you might steal it back.

Maybe the truest art isn’t in a museum. Maybe it’s smeared across the side of a bus shelter, fading in the rain, daring you to dance on it.

What does a 185-year-old painting say about the attack on the Capitol Building?

By Alastair JR Ball

Like many people, I was horrified by the events early this month at the US Capitol Building in Washington, when armed protestors broke into the building and members of Congress were forced to hide in fear for their lives. Images of the Capitol Building covered in smoke, surrounded by chaos, filled the world’s TV screens and social media feeds for days afterward. Days later an image came to my mind that encapsulated what had happened. It wasn’t a photo from the day, but a painting made 185 years ago.

The painting is called Destruction and was painted by Anglo-American artist Thomas Cole in 1836. Cole couldn’t have foreseen our age of internet conspiracy theories or a time where the President of the United States would use Twitter to encourage people claiming to be patriots to attack the very seat of the American government, (I have been living through the last four years and I couldn’t have predicted this would happen - although perhaps I should have), however, his painting tells us a lot about how we got into this situation.

The Course of Empire

Take a look at the painting. Destruction is obviously apt to describe last week’s events, but the painting is relevant not just because it depicts a neo-classical capital city being disrupted by an uprising, but because of what Cole intended to communicate when he painted it.

Destruction is part of a series of paintings called The Course of Empire. In these paintings, Cole outlines the rise and fall of a fictional civilisation, according to a popular view at the time that history was a series of civilisations rising and falling. The five paintings show the complete life cycle of a civilisation, its rise from a nomadic existence, to a great culture that builds huge grand cities, to its destruction and then finally becoming abandoned ruins.

The fourth painting in the sequence, Destruction, shows the fall of the great civilisation as it is engulfed in either a civil war or an outside invasion. Although the paintings don’t depict any particular civilisation, they do show a classical civilisation in the model of Ancient Greece or Rome. The paintings make the argument that this is an inevitable trajectory for all civilisations: if you rise you will fall.

Pastoral America

For Cole, the second painting in the series, The Arcadian or Pastoral State, which represented pastoralism was the ideal state. This is where humanity is at peace with the land, farming it but living in harmony with it. Cole didn’t want America to lose touch with nature and become an urban, complex society as this would lead to America progressing along the expected trajectory of all civilisations and, ultimately, to its downfall. If America left pastoralism behind it would lead to the ruin shown in the 5th painting, Desolation.

The third painting in the sequence, The Consummation of Empire, shows a society at the height of its power, a society with a refined culture that has built great monuments to itself. However, the seeds of its downfall have already been sowed as a demagogue is shown riding to power on the back of waves of popular elation: this civilisation has found its Caesar.

These paintings have something to tell us about what happened in America last week. It’s telling that the society painted by Cole was brought down by a demagogue, loved by his people, who destabilised his society. However, what’s more instructive is Cole’s idea behind making the paintings: that the signs of civilisation or metropolitan living, as summed up in The Consummation of Empire, are in themselves a sign that America has lost its way and is headed for destruction.

Against civil society

Many Americans want America to be as Cole saw it: a pastoral, rural society. One free of complex things like modern governments, metropolitan culture and a plurality of ethnicities. It’s not that these people, many of whom support Donald Trump, think that Joe Biden or the Democrats are their enemies; it’s that they see the whole idea of American civil society as their enemy.

Being opposed to the peaceful transition of power after your leader loses an election equals being opposed to civil society. Leaving fact behind, and living in an alternative reality where Trump won the election and the Democrats are part of a satanic pedophile ring, is to set yourself against the common truth that make civil society possible. To hate cities and believe that everyone should live in small, rural communities is against civil society.

Cole’s paintings show that this resistance to civil society (not shown at all in the first painting, The Savage State, which shows a hunter-gatherer society, or the second painting, The Arcadian or Pastoral State) has been part of the American mindset from the beginning. Trump didn’t turn the people against civil society (although he certainly made them angrier with it) and getting rid of Trump will not change the fundamental view, held by many Americans, that their society has been on the wrong course since the time of Cole.

The real threat to America

Many Americans are still fighting to stop America from moving away from its pastoral roots. America needs to find some way to address the fact that a large number of Americans see their own civil society as against them, if the country is to move beyond its current state of being hopelessly divided, riven and at its own throats.

Take another look at Thomas Cole’s Destruction. It’s the ideas behind Cole’s paintings that, imbedded deep within the American consciousness, might lead to its destruction; not its progress along a mythical road to becoming metropolitan civilisation. The resistance to this process is more likely to destroy America than embrace it. That’s what we saw last week.

Image credit: Thomas Cole, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons