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

In music for strings or flutes and in song and vocal music, a certain harmony must be maintained among the different sounds, and if this is altered or discordant, the trained ear cannot bear to hear it. This harmony in concord and agreement is achieved by means of the modulation of highly dissimilar voices. And in the same way, from the high, the low, and between them the middle orders of society, as from sounds, a city comes together in agreement by means of a consensus, modulated by reason, of its very different parts. Now what the musicians call harmony in singing corresponds to concord in a city, which is the best and closest bond of well-being in a republic; and, without justice, it cannot exist at all.²

This passage would have been readily available to Dante in the City of God, where Augustine turns it against Cicero and against the purported justice of the Roman state. For Cicero, justice is essential to political harmony, analogous to the successful blending of diverse musical

Figure 1.

Giotto di Bondone, “Allegories of the vices and virtues”. Arena Chapel, Padua, c. 1306.

instruments and voices sounding together. The simile thus aligns justice with what the French call justesse (tuning or tempering) in music, an auditory perception of pitch: how accurately a sound corresponds to its intended place on the musical scale.³

Therefore, while music abounds in the Divine Comedy, especially in Paradiso where song is a primary expression of beatitude, there is a particular conceptual aptness to the musical references in the cantos devoted to justice set in the heaven of Jupiter. In addition to Platonic notions of harmony and concord, these references also recall the exhortations to music-making in the psalms, a context marked by themes of kingship, mercy, and justice. The corporate image Dante uses to represent the just rulers in this heaven is an eagle through which they all speak with one voice. The focus on the production of sound in the hollow of the eagle’s throat and beak likens it to the playing of musical instruments, specified as both stringed and wind, just as in Cicero’s simile. In his discussion of voice in his treatise on the soul, Aristotle similarly used a stringed instrument and a wind instrument (the lyre and the flute, or the harp and the pipe) as examples of inanimate objects that can be said to have voice only metaphorically.⁴ As we shall see, Dante’s detailed attention to the mechanics of sound production in this political image in the heaven of Jupiter moreover transforms violence into music.⁵

The eagle is the symbol of Rome’s imperial dominion, the legitimate authority of universal monarchy, as is clear in the biography of this sign narrated by the emperor Justinian in Paradiso 6. In developing his political theory in Convivio, Dante had radically redefined the role of violence in the Romans’ conquest of the world as merely its instrumental cause: “the way the blows of a hammer are the cause of the knife.” The real cause, what Dante called the “efficient and moving” cause, analogous to the mind of the smith making the knife, was divine reason; in other words, eternal law.⁶ What appeared unjust (subjugation by force) turns out to correspond to a...