Yesterday P and I weren't feeling very ambitious on a rainy Sunday. After a light brunch that featured a couple glasses of Peg's favorite pink champagne, we decided to make our way over to Big Flats to the Antique Revival, a rambling, high-end store situated in what appeared to be several warehouses stuck together. Our stated goal was to start getting ideas for the firm's new Panama City office, scheduled to rise like a phoenix from the wreckage of 10.10.18 in a bare seven weeks down on Jenks Avenue.
It is an empirically verifiable fact that I have absolutely no eye for interior design. My folks always let Ethan Allen make their decorating choices when I was a kid, and as an adult I was so cheap and careless about where I slept and ate and defecated that Rooms To Go couches would be worn shiny by boys and pets before it occurred to me to pull out my credit card and go back to some mid-brow department store to buy another few sticks of throwaway furniture. That was all fine with me.
Nowadays I live in spaces that appear to have come from a fashion magazine, or perhaps Garden and Gun. That would be P at work, with her eclectic assembly of furniture and accessories, and natural sense of feng shui that makes every space she tackles feel comfortable and welcoming. I'm just grateful that I get to live in such an aesthetically appealing home, or homes, while remaining as oblivious as ever to how that happens.
So it should come as no surprise that our big purchase from the antique store was not some object d'art or bookcase or French empire period desk (although they had all those things, and they were lovely), but rather a 19th century print of lady justice to hang on some wall in the new office environs.
The photo is a little fuzzy, but you get the idea.
What intrigued me about the print wasn't its familiar presentation of the scales of justice, or the A cup wardrobe malfunction, or the persistent question of why Renaissance women always had such knuckly, ugly feet. I am guessing your eye is drawn to the same detail, and the same question.
What in the hell is up with the bird? And why does Justicia grip it by the neck?
Although I thought at first that the aviary character was some sort of overfed heron, in fact it is meant to be an ostrich. A very spindly, very confused looking ostrich.
The reason for its presence is sort of a mystery. A book has been written on the subject. The original piece hangs in the Vatican Library, painted by Raphael in the first two decades of the sixteenth century (we know it had to be before 1520 because poor Raphy died in his 30s that year, on Good Friday in fact, allegedly as a result of exhaustion from too much sex. So I guess that's a thing).
The artist left us to speculate why he included an ostrich. In ancient Egypt the ostrich played a role in one's passage to the afterlife, as the decedent's heart was weighed in a scale against a single ostrich feather. Ostriches were tough, ostriches were gluttonous, ostriches were stoic, ostriches were stupid. Above all else, in this era ostriches were seen as an enigma, a flightless "sparrow camel" that symbolized our uncertain relationship with the natural world. The ostrich called us up short; made no sense.
And maybe that's what Raphael was trying to convey. Remember what would normally be in the left hand of Justicia--a sword, the symbol of the cruel application of justice as a human construct. Replacing the sword with a befuddled, stunted, flightless bird reminds that our notions of justice exist in a natural context we barely understand. Maybe a little humility is in order as we apply our system of justice in what John Prine called our "big ol' goofy world."
Enough musing. My phone is already ringing with clients demanding an early audience, and I need to tidy up for the day of Zoom depositions that lies ahead. I'll try to remember that ostrich as I grill a couple plaintiffs about their case. Humility is the trait an old, battered lawyer learns to appreciate the most.
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