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Changes in Symbols 214 Chapter 8 Chapter 8 Changes in Symbols The language of symbols accompanies history at its own pace and in its own fashion, adapting to new patterns, anticipating realities still in flux or in the embryonal state of utopia and providing older signs with new meanings. Jus- tice in its many elements—the blindfold of impartiality, the sword of punish- ment, the palm or olive branch of mercy, the weighing of merits and guilt, the supreme countenance of God, the Book of judgment—registered the changes taking place, indicating what had been discarded as well as the innovations. One after the other, the symbolic attributes inherited by tradition were the object, between the 17th and 18th centuries, of biting, derisive, relentless at- tacks. First in line was the most common and most feared: the sword. We can read the verses of Bernard Mandeville’s, The Fable of the Bees: Yet, it was thought, the Sword she bore Check’d but the desp’rate and the poor; That, urged by mere necessity, Were tied up to the wretched tree For crimes, which not deserv’d that Fate, But to secure the rich and great.1 No other writing, among the numerous descriptions of hangings and execu- tions circulating in print or recited on the stage, had voiced similar thoughts and with such great and bitter bluntness. The sword, the principal attribute of that solemn feminine figure which was the direct heir of the Angel of Eden and of the Last Judgment, revealed its true self: a hateful instrument of oppression which struck not the sinners of the City of God but the poor confined to the margins of the earthly city, dangerous because they were disinherited. Besides, it was an obvious reality for anyone who cared to look upon the scenes which repeated themselves daily at the sites of execution. And this was more obvious in London than elsewhere: here the condemned were killed with a cold-blood- edness and a lack of emotion and religiosity which never failed to astonish Italians. So much indifference was typical of dying “in the English fashion” re- marked Alessandro Verri astonished by the absence of piety in the rituals 1 Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees, p. 67. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004368675_009 Changes In Symbols 215 connected with death.2 The religious elements which in other countries still cloaked the harsh reality of class violence here had been totally abandoned: the bodies of the wretched who ended their violent lives suspended from the gallows of Tyburn could not find even after death the peace of burial with tra- ditional rites. Furious struggles were common between those who wished to untangle the cadaver from the ropes and proceed to a proper burial and those who wished to claim that lifeless object which belonged to no one (according to the legal statute) for the use of anatomical exercises at the flourishing Eng- lish universities.3 The corpses of thieves and prostitutes in England entered the scientific circuit with a violence not mitigated by the religious rites still in use elsewhere—for example, in the Milan of Alessandro Verri where his broth- er Pietro worked with Cesare Beccaria to reform the system of crime and pun- ishment. But even in Milan, in spite of the different contexts, words and images were in those years no longer instruments of propaganda in the hands of po- litical and religious authorities but of censure and an impetuous desire for re- form. Whoever, defying censorship, opened the small but great book of Cesare Beccaria (and of Pietro Verri), Dei delitti e delle pene in the Livorno 1765 edition, was confronted by an image of the goddess Justice in all her beauty and nobil- ity, seated on a throne turning away her horrified face from the executioner clutching the severed head of a victim.4 The special sensibility felt by Cesare Beccaria for the feminine condition to which he dedicated an eloquent page on the crime of infanticide suggested to him the idea of the goddess averting her gaze (as always the controversial symbol) at the sight of the punishment of death. The new ideas brought with them a spirit of mercy which seems to have found expression in what was, as far as we know, the first (and perhaps the only) instance of a blindfolded Justice in Italy. We encounter it on the title page of a treatise on criminal law by the Roman academic and lawyer Filippo Maria Renazzi (1745-1808). Here the blindfolded virgin stomps on the sword, holds a 2 The observation can be read in a “report on how to have one’s self hanged in the English fashion” contained in the letter written by Alessandro Verri to his brother Pietro on 25 January 1767 (Viaggio a Parigi e a Londra [1766-67]. Carteggio di Pietro e Alessandro Verri, ed. Gianmarco Gaspari [Milan: Adelphi, 1980], pp. 250-256). Similar observations can be found in a descrip- tion of an execution in the United States written by the journalist Dario Papa (Corriere della Sera, 6-7 June 1882; now reprinted in Franco Contorbia, ed., Giornalismo italiano, 1: 1860-1901 [Milan: Mondadori, 2007], pp. 932-940). 3 See Peter Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons,” in Douglas Hay, et al., eds., Albion’s Fatal Tree. Crime and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1975), pp. 65-117. 4 The engraving is by Giovanni Lapi, based on an idea of Beccaria’s, and reproduced in Franco Venturi, Settecento riformatore. Da Muratori a Beccaria (Turin: Einaudi, 1969), fig. 55..
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