The Justice of Trajan

In January 1517 Verona went back to Venice after eight years under the emperor Maximilian, and the museum dates this painting to the same year. It comes from the front of a house in the city, the palazzo Cattanei, where another surviving fragment showed the doge of Venice, Leonardo Loredan, with senators and part of the winged lion of Saint Mark, the emblem of the Republic. The lion's head was destroyed later, when a new window was cut into the wall.

The story painted here is about a ruler's justice. As the emperor Trajan rode out to war, a widow stopped him and demanded justice for her murdered son. He told her it would wait until his return. She asked what would happen if he never came back, and he got down from his horse and had the case settled there and then. The tale circulated widely in the Middle Ages, and Dante describes it as one of the marble reliefs the souls pass on the terrace of the proud in his Purgatory.