214 Summary The Image of Justice in Seventeenth Century Sweden BY PROFESSOR ALLAN ELLENIUS The place of Justice among the Cardinal Virtues was already established during Antiquity, not only by Plato in The State, but also by Aristotle, who in the Ethics namedJustice as the crown upon and the perfection of all virtues. As the guiding principle for both the individual’s action as well as that of the state, Justitia, from the late Middle Ages onward became an important feature in allegorical art. Iconographic combinations were developed which would become definitive for the continued development within the visual arts. AmbrogioLorenzetti’s fresco of the goodand evil citygovernment in Palazzo Pubblico in Sienna (1335/40) was presented as the starting point for the foliowing analysis. The Biblical and the Augustinian traditions met here Scholasticism’s juridical practice and crystallized in the composition ofJustitia and Pax\ thesource herewas Psalms 84:12. Inaccordance withthepolarization withinthe medieval psychomachia both of these virtues are presented as victorious and inseparable. They became the objects for individual pictures, as was the case in a painting and drawing by Marten de Vos (Fig. 6, 1598), but they could also be combined in larger allegorical representations. The emphasis of Justitia’s role within the hierarchy of virtues developed special forms in Italian art during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example in the iconography of thepapal graves and infrontispieces. InJohannes Magnus’ Historia de omnibus Gothorum Sveonumque regibus (1554), she is presented as presiding over the globe of Fortune, the symbol of earthly transcience, and assisted byFortitudo and Prudentia. This dominance was developed within the frameworkof a religious systemof meaningprimarily associated with the Last Judgement. Examples arepresented which demonstratethat the religious and the profane meanings tended to become blurred; that was first of all true of pictures that had their place in the courtrooms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and that was a tradition whichsurvived intothe seventeenth century.
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