The Justice of Trajan

Author: Klazina Botke

Just as Emperor Trajan (53-117) is about to leave Rome with his army to fight the Dacians, a widow stops him. One of his soldiers had killed her son and she demands that the guilty person should be condemned immediately. Initially, the Emperor wants her to wait until after the battle, but eventually she convinces him with her plea and he postpones his journey until after the murderer’s trial. The story is referred to in a number of texts but is best known through the narrative by Dante Alighieri (1265-1321). In his Divine Comedy he portrays Trajan as the good example: he shows the souls in Purgatory that humility is a virtue and pride a sin (Purgatorio 10, ll. 73-96).^[1] The drawing shows the woman in the left foreground, kneeling with the dead child in her lap. Behind her the guilty soldier leans on his weapon while Trajan, on his horse, turns to his companion and points to the woman. We see Rome’s city walls in the background.

The work was acquired by Koenigs as a drawing by Moretto da Brescia (c.1498-1554), an old attribution that was noted on the back of the sheet.^[2] Based on a comparable drawing in Berlin (c.1462-64), Philip Pouncey attributed it in 1957 to the workshop of Vincenzo Foppa (1427-1515/1516).^[3] The Berlin drawing is considered to be a preliminary study for one of Foppa’s frescoes in the Palazzo del Banco Mediceo in Milan (c.1463). The famous architect and sculptor Antonio Averlino Filarete (c.1400-1465/1469), who saw the work with his own eyes, wrote in his Trattato di architettura [Treatise on architecture] (c.1464) that the fresco, containing a scene of the justice of Emperor Trajan, was in the loggia to the left of the main entrance.^[4] The building was demolished at the end of the eighteenth century and consequently the composition has survived only in the Berlin drawing.^[5] Foppa’s drawing was an example of many fifteenth-century compositions with the justice of Trajan as subject, including a bronze relief in Washington and a 1502 engraving by Giovanni Maria da Brescia (fig.).^[6] Our sheet also belongs in this group because, despite the simplifications and minor differences, it is clear that the stances and gestures of the figures were made after Foppa’s example.^[7]

Rogier van der Weyden’s (1399/1400-1464) famous justice scenes (1439-50) for Brussels Town Hall have an earlier composition in which Trajan looks at the woman and the body of the dead child lies on the ground. Sadly, the panels themselves have been lost and now the composition is known only from a tapestry (c.1450) that was made after the painting.^[8] This pictorial tradition also had a broad scope. The anonymous Rotterdam drawing N 90 is based on it, as is the later print (1537) by Hans Sebald Boham (1500-1550).^[9] According to Salvatore Settis, in the final analysis all depictions of this legend arise from an iconographic series that originated much earlier, namely with the reliefs of classical antiquity, in which a man kneels in front of Emperor Trajan, who is on horseback.^[10]

The sheet is squared, for transfer of the composition to another format or medium. The kneeling woman is furthermore pricked out in order to copy the figure. On the verso there are still visible traces of charcoal which further indicate the transfer process. Over the centuries the clarity of the composition has suffered somewhat because the white heightening has oxidized and a few large stains detract from the sheet’s appearance.