Inscribed in the copy, "REX SUM JUSTICIE."
This idea was afterwards much amplified and adorned in the only good
capital of the Renaissance series, under the Judgment angle. Giotto has
also given his whole strength to the painting of this virtue,
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, and the
betrothed knight of Britomart, or chastity.
SECTION LXIII. _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 compass. But forethought or
anticipation, by which, independently of greater or less natural
capacities, one man becomes more _prudent_ than another, is never
enough considered or symbolized.
The idea of this virtue oscillates, in the Greek systems, between
Temperance and Heavenly Wisdom.