The image of Justice blindfolded is so common in the European and particularly the Anglo-Saxon world that it is easy to forget how culturally conditioned it is. The blindfold, the scales, and the sword all emerged in different areas of Christian Europe through the late Middle Ages, and they were not always joined or accepted. Only the gender of Justice was widely shared. Yet while scales and sword have particular meanings, it is the blindfold that is least universal and most controversial. Some take it as a sign that Justice is objective, impartial, and unmoved by the differences in status, class, gender, or race of those who appear before her. Yet it can also be—and often was—seen as a sign that Justice is obtuse, unheeding of evidence, and open to discreetly whispered favors or threats that could tilt the balance of her scales to benefit those who came to court with an abundance of social or financial capital. Some associated the blindfold with blind fate or blind prejudice. When clear-sighted examination and weighing of evidence is the goal, who would not prefer Justice to have the use of her eyes?

Who indeed? In this suggestive and original study, Adriano Prosperi traces the evolving iconography of Justice from the medieval period to the modern day, drawing on legal treatises, theological texts, pamphlets, plays, sermons, and over one hundred images ranging from manuscript illuminations to modern tattoos, with the bulk of them from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Medieval authors reached back to classical images, and it was the Egyptians who first used a female figure—the goddess Ma'at—to personify justice. Greek and Hebrew authors picked up the scales with which Ma'at weighed those before her, though they saw different standards and values tipping the scales, and it was Jewish thought that linked these irrevocably to divine judgment of guilt or innocence. Justice commonly wielded both sword and scales, and when the blindfold finally did appear, it was as a satirical critique.

Sebastian Brant's first Basel printing of the Ship of Fools (Das Narrenschiff) in 1494 included a woodcut produced a year earlier showing a crowned and seated Justice with sword in her right hand and scales in her left being blindfolded by a jester in cap and rattles. Brant had received his doctor of laws only five years earlier, and the blindfold was a savage critique of judges who were blind to reason, evidence, and truth. The satire, Prosperi notes, developed over the following decades into a critique of the partiality of traditional communal law and an embrace of the superiority of law based on Roman models as an expression of the power and justice of the state. This emerging nexus of state power, uniform laws, and an impartial judiciary found advocates in humanists like Erasmus, religious Reformers like Luther, and legal scholars like Johann von Schwarzenberg (a committed Lutheran), whose criminal code for Bamberg became the model for the new Imperial Carolina Code of 1532.

There was no end of paradoxes and contradictions here, and Prosperi skillfully untangles the threads. The blindfold became a positive symbol for Protestants, transformed by way of the image of Christ blindfolded while being mocked and tortured by his Roman torturers. Christ remained calm—not goaded into ending a travesty of justice, but accepting the larger plan of redemption that it was part of, and signaling with his words to Dismas the Good Thief that faith and grace rather than vengeance or power animated that plan. Thus did Protestants through the early modern period find their way to a reevaluation of Justice's blindfold as a symbol of the serenity, impartiality, and grace of divine justice. Catholic iconography preferred a Justice who could see what—or who—she was weighing and where the sword should fall. These cultural divisions and national tropes would become ever more visual and visible in the bureaucratic building sprees that raised public buildings across the length and breadth of Europe and the Americas from the nineteenth century. Revolutions, confederations, and unifications might make the state a legal fact, but without symbols in stucco and stone it would never become a sacred object. Prosperi traces this evolution with learning and nuance, demonstrating an eye for the telling signs, an ear for the unanticipated formulations, and an appreciation for the enduring paradoxes.