Alegoria da justiça e da verdade

In 1543 Giorgio Vasari was a busy, well-connected painter in Rome, working fast for powerful patrons, though the reason his name survives is a book he had not yet written, the Lives of the Artists, still a main source for what we know about the Renaissance. This panel comes from those Roman years. Cardinal Alessandro Farnese commissioned it in January for a room in his palace, and Vasari, who never worked slowly, delivered it the same year. He did not invent the subject himself. The scholar Paolo Giovio handed him a dense allegory drawn from ancient writers: Justice at the centre setting a laurel crown on the head of Truth, small winged boys carrying weapons down the steps to defend her. The ostrich tucked under her arm was a familiar emblem then for patience, the virtue a judge was meant to keep.