Perugino’s Justice. The Frescoes for the Collegio del Cambio between Legal History, Iconography, and Iconology

At the end of the 15th century, the Sala dell’Udienza of the Collegio del Cambio in Perugia was decorated thanks to the collaborative work of two of Renaissance Italy’s leading intellectuals, both profoundly linked to the city: Perugino (at that time defined as “the best painter in Italy”), and the humanist Francesco Maturanzio. On the basis of the assumption that there is a need to reconstruct the unity of the human and social sciences in order to break the isolation of legal studies, this paper analyzes the iconography and iconology of the frescoes in the Sala dell’Udienza (i.e. the tribunal of the Cambio) within the wider context of the political role and jurisdictional function of the guild of money-changers in order to understand the “visual language” that the merchants of Perugia used to communicate their own idea of law and justice.