La Esperanza

In August 1469 the merchants' court of Florence, the body that settled disputes between the city's guilds, signed a contract for seven painted Virtues to line the backs of the benches where its magistrates sat in judgment. This is Hope, one of them, her hands pressed together and her eyes lifted to a sky she cannot quite see. She was not made to hang on a wall. She sat behind a working tribunal on the Piazza della Signoria, a reminder to men deciding money quarrels of what they were meant to aspire to. Piero del Pollaiuolo painted six of the seven; the last, Fortitude, went to a young newcomer named Botticelli. The panels stayed in the guild court until 1777, when they came to the Uffizi.