Justice

Giorgio Vasari was an important Renaissance painter, even though today he is mostly known for writing his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, considered the ideological foundation of art-historical writing. (Virtually anyone who took Art History in college had to read his stories of Italian painters from the 15th and 16th centuries. Some of this stories sound very improbable but some anecdotes are delightful!) Justice is one of the surviving works from Palazzo Corner Spinelli in Venice. Vasari painted thirteen works for this palace, but they are now are now dispersed in various collections or lost. Foreshortened to be viewed from below, all the allegorical figures appear to lean over an invisible parapet, their figures silhouetted against the sky. Venetian painters must have studied the work with great interest, not least the young Veronese, who later painted the ceiling of the San Sebastiano sacristy. The painting makes such good use of technique that Vasari himself had difficulty matching the felicitous and refined elaborateness of his Venetian project.