Roman Fasces in the Medieval and Renaissance Eras

Abstract

Abstract In the medieval period, the word “fasces” never fully fell out of Latin use, at least in a general sense of “supreme power” or “official honors.” Nor did the term “lictor,” because of its appearance in scripture, which preserved understanding of this attendant’s punitive role. Renaissance humanists mostly grasped the meaning of the “fasces.” Yet other than an isolated Anglo-Saxon representation of the fasces, artistic renderings of the fasces were slow to come—not until the last quarter of the fifteenth century, where they tend to signify the exercise of authority and the administration of justice. The artist Raphael (1483–1520), however, took a pronounced interest in the details of the Roman fasces, which he prominently incorporated into two high-profile Vatican commissions, which spectacularly reintroduced the fasces into the iconographic mainstream. In the next decades, papal efforts to control the administration of law in Rome culminated in a celebratory painting with—for the first time—the fasces as a key component in an elaborate allegorical scene. It was a powerful cardinal-nephew of Pope Paul III Farnese (reigned 1534–1549) who commissioned this piece in 1544 from Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574). Through this artist’s rendering of “Farnese Justice,” the fasces entered the rapidly expanding repertory of “emblems,” i.e., symbolic images with a moralizing purpose, a growth industry in the first half of the sixteenth century. Indeed, four popes over the next two centuries had their tombs adorned with the rods and axe as a symbol of justice, starting with that of Paul III himself.