ABSTRACT
This chapter describes some emblems of justice in the Italian communal period. Images of justice and politics were more than visualizations that translated legal ideas, practices or institutions for a lay public. The absence of any trustworthy party in the decision chambers and law courts of Italian city states forced communal councils and jurists to collaborate in developing elaborate and creative institutional, visual and spatial means of protecting the state, essentially, against themselves. The imagination, energy and expense in humanizing communal justice through a variety of media derive from the fragility of Italian city-state justice and governance in general. Communes had to protect their judiciaries from competing claims by church jurisdiction, even by heretical cults and to defend their autonomous rule from the superpowers of their day. The Maesta herself amplified the podesta's general political status, as the protector of the city and a trait they shared. Both were undefiled by political corruption and by sexual corruption.
