Judgment of Solomon

This scene of a king ordering a baby cut in two once hung in a Venetian government office. In 1533 Bonifazio made it for a chamber of the Magistrato del Sale, one of the financial magistracies housed in the Palazzo dei Camerlenghi beside the Rialto. The treasurers who worked there wanted Old Testament kings on their walls for a reason. Solomon, threatening to divide a child to reveal its true mother, stood for the wisdom and even-handed justice that Venice liked to claim for its own government. Two of the officials who commissioned it, Andrea Marcello and Paolo Valaresso, left their posts that same year. Bonifazio built the picture around a steep, sharply foreshortened floor that pulls your eye toward the throne and the two women pleading before it.