398 THE STONES OF VENICE

This idea was afterwards much amplified and adorned in the only good capital of the Renaissance series, under the Judgment angle.¹ Giotto has also given his whole strength to the painting of this virtue,² representing her as enthroned under a noble Gothic canopy, holding scales, not by the beam, but one in each hand; a beautiful idea, showing that the equality of the scales of Justice is not owing to natural laws, but to her own immediate weighing the opposed causes in her own hands. In one scale is an executioner beheading a criminal; in the other an angel crowning a man, who seems (in Selvatico’s plate) to have been working at a desk or table.

Beneath her feet is a small predella, representing various persons riding securely in the woods, and others dancing to the sound of music.

Spenser’s Justice, Sir Artegall, is the hero of an entire book [v.], and the betrothed knight of Britomart, or Chastity.

§ 84. Seventh side. Prudence. A man with a book and a pair of compasses, wearing the noble cap, hanging down towards the shoulder, and bound in a fillet round the brow, which occurs so frequently during the fourteenth century in Italy in the portraits of men occupied in any civil capacity.

This virtue is, as we have seen, conceived under very different degrees of dignity, from mere worldly prudence up to heavenly wisdom, being opposed sometimes by Stultitia, sometimes by Ignorantia. I do not find, in any of the representations of her, that her truly distinctive character, namely forethought, is enough insisted upon: Giotto expresses her vigilance and just measurement or estimate of all things by painting her as Janus-headed, and gazing into a convex mirror, with compasses in her right hand; the convex mirror showing her power of looking at many things in small

¹ [Capital No. 36; see below, § 127.]

² [In the Arena Chapel. See, for a further description of Giotto’s “Justice,” Fors Clavigera, Letter 11, where the fresco is engraved as frontispiece. The scenes in the predella indicate (says Lord Lindsay, ii. 197) that “the enjoyment of life is the fruit of the equal enforcement of law.”]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]