Justitia

Spitzweg painted his Lady Justice around 1857, in a Germany still uneasy after the failed revolutions of 1848, where police and censors kept a close watch. At first glance she is the usual figure, blindfold, sword, scales. Look closer and the joke turns quietly sour. Cracks run through the pedestal she stands on, the scales in her hand are broken, and the blindfold has slipped askew. Below her a watchman glances sideways at us, not quite trustworthy. Spitzweg made his living needling the small hypocrisies of respectable German life, and here he turns that dry humour on the law itself, letting the crumbling stone and the crooked cloth carry the whole point.