The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald

The Justice of Trajan and Herkinbald was a set of large panel paintings made around 1450 by the Early Netherlandish painter Rogier van der Weyden for the courtroom of the Brussels town hall, destroyed in the French bombardment of Brussels in 1695. The paintings showed two legendary exercises of justice: the Roman emperor Trajan pausing his campaign to grant a widow's plea for vengeance on her son's killer, and the Brabantine judge Herkinbald ordering the execution of his own nephew for rape. Contemporaries ranked the paintings alongside Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece as one of the great achievements of the age, intended to remind the city's judges to dispense impartial justice. The composition survives today only through a wool, silk and gold-and-silver-thread tapestry copy commissioned around 1450 by George of Saluzzo, Bishop of Lausanne, now held by the Historical Museum of Bern in Switzerland. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/