In contrast to this, the attitude to the wax seal in Italy is complex and less easy to define. Wax seals were used in Italy by bishops in the late eleventh century, and developed in the Papal Chancery and among Papal officials even though the Popes themselves continued to seal in lead. Wax seals were used by towns in the twelfth century. The case of Venice is particularly interesting, since the Doge and Signoria used lead bulls: the Doge’s lead bulla having a static representation of the Doge’s investiture. However, the Venetian magistracy and administration by the fourteenth century used wax seals with the lion of St Mark on one side and the other the name of the official or the person sealing.6
Turning to seals, a collection of Italian matrices, now in the Ashmolean Museum Oxford, was acquired by Richard Rawlinson, an early eighteenth-century antiquarian with Jacobite sympathies, in Rome in 1721. He bought the collection, which had been formed in the late seventeenth century by Giovanni Andrea Lorenzani, a Roman bronze caster, in 1721. With the collection came a catalogue, by Abate Valese or Valesio, compiled in 1708.
The pride of that collection – the first in number and in importance to Abbate Valese – was literally the number One seal – that of Giovanni da Vico, Prefect of Rome.7 The Vico family were hereditary Prefects. The Prefect controlled the administrative and judicial system of the City of Rome, although the office appears to have largely ceremonial by the thirteenth century.8 Giovanni is named as Prefect, and his arms are shown. He was hardly an exemplary person to be in control of the law, since having succeeded his father, he murdered his brother in 1338, and set up as tyrant in Viterbo. In 1347 Cola da Rienzi, himself a notary, deprived him of the prefecture of Rome and took the title himself by a decree of the Roman parliament, attacked Viterbo, and defeated Giovanni. Giovanni came to Rome, submitted to Cola, and received back the prefecture as his vassal. It is likely, but not certain, that Giovanni had a matrix engraved when he first assumed the office of Prefect in 1337, and that this object reflects that matrix. The object in Rawlinson’s collection is a metal cast matrix (Rawlinson 105; Fig. 9.1–9.3) made before 1708 and possibly earlier in the seventeenth century. It is not a medieval matrix. This metal cast matrix may have made cast from a wax seal or, less likely, a cast from a metal matrix. Whatever it was, is now lost, and we will never know. There is a second cast metal matrix in the University Library at Bologna.9
Since it is a cast metal matrix, this makes the detail of the design and inscriptions difficult to define exactly. The inscriptions refer to his name, Giovanni, the source of his authority from the Pope and Emperor, and the dignity of his role, which is aided by judges and words faithfully recorded by notaries. In the centre is the judicial figure of the Prefect, as a symbol or personification of Iustitia, seated on a bench with lions’ heads. Beneath and on a smaller scale on either side are notaries with their inkpots and quills and judges with their books. His attributes are the sword of justice and a golden rose from the Pope. The seated figure with a sword recalls seated Kings or Emperors in judgement and majesty. The gold bull of Emperor Louis of Bavaria used in 1328 may be cited as a possible comparison.10
The design of this seal has been compared to the reverse of the City of London seal of before 1219 which shows St Thomas Becket, a Londoner, seated on the top of an arch above the city of London. At the two ends of the arch are two small groups of citizens kneeling in prayer. The legend reads ‘Thomas, Do not cease protecting me (the city) who gave thee birth’. A source for this arrangement, and also for the organisation of the Prefect’s seal, may be found in the iconography of the Last Judgement, where God the Father sits in judgement. The London seal, which T. A. Heslop suggests may have been the work of Master Walter de Ripa was described by him as ‘one of the outstanding civic seals of medieval Europe’. Whether the early thirteenth-century London seal was known in Rome in the mid-fourteenth century is unknown. And if it was, why it came, if it did, to influence the design of Giovanni’s seal is unclear.11
Quentin Skinner has shown how the ideas underlying the paintings in Siena derive from the pre-humanist literature on city government, which stressed the need for justice to have full control of local feudatories and to have sufficient military strength available to enforce justice. Writers such as Giovanni da Viterbo and Bruno Latini frequently describe the power of government in elaborately symbolic images. City magistrates are instructed to deliver their judgements ‘from a throne of glory’; to carry a sceptre ‘in their strong right hand, with extended arm and to ensure that the sceptre itself ‘is not like a reed, but strong and made of wood, like a shepherd’s staff’. This reflects the way that Giovanni da Vico displays his attributes on his seal.