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Since the early 1990s, discourse on 'good governance' has become more prevalent. What 'good governance' means and entails, however, and when we can speak of 'good' governance in this discourse, is not always clear. Many scholars in public administration and other social sciences writing about good governance have used visual interpretations of good governance from centuries ago to illustrate their case in point. Here, we also use pictures from the past -Lorenzetti's Sienese frescoes to be more precise -yet, not as an illustration, but as the core of the argument. Our main research question is: how can Lorenzetti's frescoes of Good Governance inspire our modern-day conception of good governance? We conclude that good governance is governance by good governors, and good governors are governors guided by benevolence. We end with a discussion of what that entails for modern-day governance practice. Points for practitionersGovernance without integrity violations is not necessarily good governance. Benevolence is needed for that.

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Prints depicting disasters were produced to create visible and explicit markers of memorable events. In this essay, a print with an allegory of a fire in Amsterdam's Schouwburg theatre is used to investigate this particular function of disaster prints, first by looking closely at the iconography and then at the larger network of disasters that were used as points of reference after the fire. The print serves as a starting point for investigating the deeper impact of images in the longer term. The same format was adopted 35 years later, in a print depicting the explosion of a gunpowder ship in the heart of the city of Leiden. It seems that the allegory of the fire gave the artist the same possibilities of visualising communally felt feelings of loss. Furthermore, the print of the Leiden explosion was consciously designed to evoke memories of a fire in Amsterdam where its primary audience was located. These destructive disasters had an impact that transcended towns and regions, and prints referred back to disasters in the past to communicate impact of recent events. In the Leiden print, meant for an Amsterdam audience, the usual points of reference were complemented with an image of a local disaster, i.e. the Schouwburg fire, to underline and encourage interurban connections. This allusion to a carefully chosen disaster in the past helped evoke an appropriate response to a catastrophe in the present. This art historical study offers insight into the importance of images in disaster responses and demonstrates how disaster prints could stimulate interurban charity by evoking familiar pictures of local catastrophes.

In the seventeenth century, Dutch charitable institutions were the subject of international praise and the object of civic pride, and their public façades communicated a message of central importance to its citizens. In this essay, I examine the iconography of seventeenth-century "gates of charity," focusing on the almoner's orphanage in Gouda and the Holy Ghost orphanage in Leiden. I relate them to other orphanages in the Dutch Republic to show developments in their iconography. The façade decorations demonstrate the responsibilities of the city as benefactor, the expectations of its citizens and the supposed effects of charity upon the community. At the gates, the worlds of the rich and the poor collided. Here, charity could flourish making the community a mirror image of the heavenly realm. The gate portrays the perfect society as one that assists its poor and strengthens its communal ties.