Stained Glass Panel: Justice
Unknown · 1585-1615
A woman stands on a pedestal holding a sceptre in her right hand, framed by an arch from which garlands and scrolls hang. The piers on either side are stacked balusters, and in the spandrels of the arch a shield, perhaps invented, is repeated twice. Most of the panel is grisaille, grey paint on clear glass warmed with the yellow of silver stain, but the painter used a few pieces of coloured glass, red and violet, for the mantle and the arch, so that the figure glows against her monochrome setting. On the pedestal a Latin inscription in Roman capitals reads: it is the first of virtues, without which neither friendship nor concord nor constancy can exist. The virtue meant is Justice.
The panel was painted in France around sixteen hundred, when stained glass was moving from churches into private houses as a decorative art. It surfaced at the Saint-Rémy sale in February eighteen forty-one, where the collector Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot bought it for eighty-five francs fifty, plus five francs for the frame, as his purchase book records. Sauvageot gave his entire collection to the Louvre in eighteen fifty-six.
Did You Know? The collector's ledger records the price precisely: eighty-five francs fifty for the glass and five francs for the frame.
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