In full, straight-falling, golden robe, with white mantle over it; a church in her left hand; her right raised, with the forefinger lifted; (indicating heavenly source of all Christian law? or warning?)
Head-dress, a white veil floating into folds in the air. You will find nothing in these frescoes without significance; and as the escaping hair of Geometry indicates the infinite conditions of lines of the higher orders, so the floating veil here indicates that the higher relations of Christian justice are indefinable. So her golden mantle indicates that it is a glorious and excellent justice beyond that which unchristian men conceive; while the severely falling lines of the folds, which form a kind of gabled niche for the head of the Pope beneath, correspond with the strictness of true Church discipline firmer as well as more luminous statute.
Beneath, Pope Clement V., in red, lifting his hand, not in the position of benediction, but, I suppose, of injunction,—only the forefinger straight, the second a little bent, the two last quite. Note the strict level of the book; and the vertical directness of the key.
The medallion puzzles me. It looks like a figure counting money.
Technical Points.—Fairly well preserved; but the face of the science retouched: the grotesquely false perspective of the Pope's tiara, one of the most curiously naïve examples of the entirely ignorant feeling after merely scientific truth of form which still characterized Italian art.
Type of church interesting in its extreme simplicity; no idea of transept, campanile, or dome.
X. PRACTICAL THEOLOGY. The beginning of the knowledge of God being Human Justice, and its elements defined by Christian Law, the application of the law so defined follows, first with respect to man, then with respect to God.
"Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's—and to God the things that are God's."
We have therefore now two sciences, one of our duty—to men, the other to their Maker.
This is the first: duty to men. She holds a circular medallion, representing Christ preaching on the Mount, and points with her right hand to the earth.