Justice of Zaleuco

When Melchiorre Baldassini, a lawyer at the papal court, finished his new house in Rome around 1519, he wanted its rooms to say something about the law he served. In 1521 Perino del Vaga painted this scene into the frieze of the main floor. It shows Zaleucus, a lawgiver of the Greek colony of Locri in southern Italy, seven centuries before Christ. His own son had been convicted of adultery, and the penalty Zaleucus himself had written was the loss of both eyes. Rather than exempt his son or break his own law, he had one of his own eyes put out and one of the boy's. Here he lifts his hand toward the executioner while the son sits, resigned, at the foot of a column. In the 19th century the fresco was cut from the wall and transferred to canvas, which is how a Roman room now hangs in the Uffizi.