Lady Justice - San Diego, CA - Epic Beings and Creatures on Waymarking.com

This sculpture is located at the top of a staircase at the San Diego History Center. Access to the second floor is restricted to staff...but the work can be seen from the 1st floor lobby. It depicts a golden woman, larger than life-size...10 feet tall, holding a sword in her left hand and scales with her right.
The placard accompanying the work is at the foot of the staircase and informs us that this zinc sculpture was first placed on San Diego's new courthouse in the late 1880s. There were five sculptures of women representing Agriculture, Liberty, Commerce, Industry and this one...Justice. She was placed on the top of the courthouse's tower. In 1939, the sculptures were removed, went to a garden, then to a religious group on the slopes of Mount Shasta and finally to an antique dealer in Glendale, CA. In 1982, the San Diego Historical Assn. purchased the badly damaged piece and restored it.

Wikipedia (visit link) has this to say about the allegorical figure of Lady Justice:

"Lady Justice (Latin: Justitia, the Roman goddess of Justice, who is equivalent to the Greek goddess Dike) is an allegorical personification of the moral force in judicial systems...
The personification of justice balancing the scales of truth and fairness dates back to the Goddess Maat, and later Isis, of ancient Egypt. The Hellenic deities Themis and Dike were later goddesses of justice. Themis was the embodiment of divine order, law, and custom, in her aspect as the personification of the divine rightness of law. However, a more direct connection is to Themis' daughter Dike, who was portrayed carrying scales

"If some god had been holding level the balance of Dike" is a surviving fragment of Bacchylides's poetry. Ancient Rome adopted the image of a female goddess of justice, which it called Justitia. Since Roman times, Justitia has frequently been depicted carrying scales and a sword, and wearing a blindfold. Her modern iconography frequently adorns courthouses and courtrooms, and conflates the attributes of several goddesses who embodied Right Rule for Greeks and Romans, blending Roman blindfolded Fortuna (fate) with Hellenistic Greek Tyche (luck), and sword-carrying Nemesis (vengeance).

Justitia is most often depicted with a set of scales typically suspended from her right hand, upon which she measures the strengths of a case's support and opposition. She is also often seen carrying a double-edged sword in her left hand, symbolizing the power of Reason and Justice, which may be wielded either for or against any party."

Time Period: Ancient Approximate Date of Epic Period: 2000 BC Epic Type: Mythical Exhibit Type: Figure, Statue, 3D Art

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Date Logged Log   06/12/2012 Metro2 visited it