By Rosa María Rodriguez Porto
Gabrielle M. Spiegel has described how these texts and images created 'a capacious field of metaphors through which medieval French society could project onto the screen of the past an image of itself in historical perspective'. If the nature of the imagines historiarum was conceptual, they would have been perceived as a sort of dislocated reality destined to foster self-conscious reflection among their audiences on the similarities and differences between past and present. The pairing of storia and storiata singles out the image of the justice of Trajan, as if highlighting the higher historiographical nature of the only non-Biblical episode among the three, for which a fixed iconography did not yet exist. Despite the popularity of the legend retelling how the emperor's virtuous deed had moved Saint Gregory to tears and ultimately earned his salvation, the theme of the justice of Trajan had hardly been depicted before the mid-fourteenth century.