Quartering by horses
The iron maiden of Nuremberg
Spiked collar
Torture chair
Gossip’s bridle
The Poggio Catino skeleton
Sword of justice
Executioner’s knife
Pillory or stocks
Whipping block |
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Axe of beheading
Provenance: Rome, Museo di Castel Sant'Angelo, 1934
Justice from the middle
ages to the 19th Century
Instruments of torture (some of which are authentic
while others are reproductions) are evidence of the
cruelty of early forms of punishment that were based
on the use of torture and execution.
The exhibits in this first section include some pillories,
a whipping block, an axe used for beheading, the sword
of justice used to decapitate Beatrice Cenci in 1599,
a copy of the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg and a spiked
collar.
The so-called “Hungarian” torture chair, of which the
museum has a copy, is only one of the countless instruments
of torture used from the sixteenth to the seventeenth
century to extract confessions from women accused of
witchcraft.
The “gossip’s bridle”, an authentic piece found in
the River Adda at Pizzighettone, is an iron mask that
was placed over the face of women accused of malicious
gossip and slander. Lashes, whips and a large collection
of iron chains used to punish, restrain and transport
prisoners to hard labour areas testify to the brutal
conditions of the notorious bagni penali, or penitentiaries,
of the nineteenth century.
The room devoted to justice at the close of the eighteenth
century and in the nineteenth century (which completes
the itinerary on the ground floor) has the red robe
worn by papal executioner Mastro Titta, alias Giovan
Battista Bugatti, for public executions; a gallows
from Alba (Italy); three guillotines, including the
one erected in Piazza del Popolo in Rome, which was
used until 1869; the objects that the Confraternity
of San Giovanni Decollato used to bring comfort to
prisoners under death sentence: alms-boxes; the “comforter’s
tunic” that took care of the condemned prisoner’s soul;
the banners with crucifixes that were raised as the
prisoner was led, in procession, to the gallows; and
the zinc cups from which the condemned man drank his
last drop of wine before he was beheaded.
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