Music, Justice, and Violencein Paradiso 20

Underneath a depiction of Justice in a narrative cycle of the life of Mary and Jesus in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua (c. 1306), Giotto crafted a musical scene of three dancing women. The scene is multi-medial on two levels: it is painted to give the illusion that it is a sculptural relief rather than a frescoed surface and it is a visual attempt to represent an audible art form. Eleonora Beck reports that in the history of the iconography of justice the association of this particular virtue with music is rare, or even unprecedented. But as she points out, musical harmony is in fact a venerable image of political concord which, as Cicero asserts in his Republic, cannot exist without justice.1