“The inspirational image of Justice as a virtuous goddess is commonplace in contemporary buildings. But few of the weighty allegorical depictions that were ubiquitous from the fourteenth through the seventeenth centuries have come down to us. These complex images were part of a tradition called exempla virtutis (examples of virtue) that identified acts “worthy of imitation” and therefore appropriate to display on town hall walls. By unearthing the classical myths, biblical stories, and Renaissance emblems that make decipherable pictures that might otherwise be ignored, one can find many references to the violence entailed—both for the judged and for judges—in adjudication.”
Flayed Alive or Maimed: Judicial Obligations Inscribed on Town Hall Walls in Bruges and Geneva
- Controlling Judges: A Fifteenth-Century Cambyses in the Town Hall of Bruges
- Bribes, Gifts and Budgets
- Skeptical about Law and Distrustful of Judges
- The Unjust Prince: Plutarch’s Theban Judges and Alciatus’s Emblems
- Dogs, Snakes and Virgins: Even-handedness in Ripa’s Iconologia
- Hands Cut: Disfigured Judges and Regal Justices for Sixteenth-Century Geneva
- Judicial Subservience and Dependence
The Challenge and Pain of Rendering Judgement: Amsterdam’s Seventeenth-Century Town Hall
- An “undertaking of megalomaniac proportions”
- The Virtues of Prosperity: Justice, Peace and Prudence Reigning over an Expanding Municipality
- “The free state flourishes, when people honor the laws”
- Harming Your Children in the Name of the Law: Solomon, Zaleucus and His Son and the Execution of Brutus’s Children
“So Shall You Be Judged”