ABSTRACT
This chapter describes on one facet-personifications of the Renaissance Virtue Justice, as clear-sighted or blindfolded to explore how shifting approaches to Justice's sight illuminate the revolutions in the relationship of judges to the polities that deploy them. During the sixteenth century and thereafter, blindfolds or otherwise obscured sight gained another valence as imposing a positive, disciplinary constraint on the act of judgment. The Enlightenment brought other justifications for rethinking the relationship of sight to knowledge and authority and additional explanations for a blindfolded Justice. Philosophy, science and political theory all gave rise to epistemological doubt thereby prompting questions about sight's impact on knowledge. Alciatus's sixteenth-century emblem of the presiding jurist instructed to render judgment according to the advice of his council was one of many images and allegorical stories regularly displayed in rooms where judgments were rendered and teaching norms of judicial subservience to rulers and their law.
