65 and 66. **Dierick Bouts: Two companion panels, life-size figures, known as =the Justice of the Emperor Otho=, and painted for the Council-Room of the Hôtel-de-Ville at Louvain, as a warning to evil-doers, perjurers, or unjust magistrates. (Compare the Gerard David of the Flaying of Sisamnes in the Academy at Bruges.) It is first necessary to understand _the story_. During the absence of the Emperor Otho in Italy (according to tradition), his empress made advances to a gentleman of the court, who rejected her offers. Piqued by this rebuff, the empress denounced him to Otho on his return as having attempted to betray her honour. Otho, without further testimony, had the nobleman beheaded. His widow appeared before the Emperor’s judgment-seat, bearing her husband’s head in her hands, and offered to prove his innocence by the ordeal of fire. She therefore held a red-hot iron in her hand unhurt. Otho, convinced of his wife’s treachery by this miraculous evidence, had the perjured empress burned alive. The _first panel_, to the R., represents the scene in two separate moments. Behind, the nobleman, in his shirt and with his hands tied, walks towards the place of execution, accompanied by his wife in a red dress and black hood, as well as by a Franciscan friar. In the foreground, the executioner (looking grimly stern) has just decapitated the victim, and is giving the head to the wife in a towel. The headless corpse lies on the ground before him. The neck originally spurted blood; flowers have been painted in to conceal this painful element. All round stand spectators, probably portraits of the Louvain magistrates, admirably rendered in Bouts’s dry and stiff but life-like manner. Behind them, within a walled garden belonging to a castle in the background, stand the Emperor with his sceptre and crown, and the faithless Empress. Good town and landscape to the L. The _second panel_, to the L., separated from this by a large triptych, represents the nobleman’s wife appearing before the enthroned Otho. In her right hand she holds her husband’s head; with her left she grasps the red-hot iron, unmoved. The brazier of charcoal in which it has been heated stands on the parti-coloured marble floor in the foreground. Around are several portraits of courtiers. Behind is represented the scene of the empress burning, which closes the episode. I need not call attention to the admirable painting of the fur, the green coat, Otho’s flowered red robe, the dog, the throne, and all the other accessories. This is considered Dierick Bouts’s masterpiece. (Go later to Louvain to complete your idea of him.) Between these two pictures are arranged =five of the finest works= in the collection.