The Art of Law

In the general introduction to this contributed volume of selected conference proceedings, the title ‘The Art of Law’ is explained, particularly by situating the Bruges interdisciplinary conference in the ‘Arts and Humanities’ movement. A short overview of the status quaestionis of historical legal iconology is given, and suggestions are made on how art historians and legal historians can collaborate in a field of research that is very attractive for both disciplines. This introductory paper also identifies some methodological and material links between the various contributions to the volume.

The antique story of the flaying of a corrupt judge, ordered by the Persian King Cambyses, generated an abundance of medieval literature. In the visual arts, the fifteenth century painting Judgment of Cambyses (1498; Groeningemuseum, Bruges) by Gerard David was a milestone in how the story was depicted. David represented it in four scenes (a diptych with two scenes on each panel): the bribery, the arrest of the judge, the flaying, and the installation of the son on his father’s skin spread over the seat. The better-known Christian iconographical tradition of the flaying of Saint Bartholomew was likely a direct inspiration for David, as well as for some miniaturists. It is my hypothesis that the refined but cruel realism of the painting is the result of a diligent observation of animal flaying—and not of a judicial practice of human flaying. In addition to this, increasingly popular representations of anatomical lessons were also a useful source of inspiration for the elaboration of the diptych. Furthermore, many scholars have interpreted the painting as an early group portrait in disguise of Bruges’ aldermen. After David, the depiction of the bribery and the arrest scenes in the Cambyses tale disappeared. Artists started concentrating on the moment of the installation of the young judge on the skin of his father, often with the flaying scene on the background. The Cambyses story, ultimately represented through an emblematic stripped-off skin, was, just as many other exemplary representations of justice, to be replaced by a symbolic iconographic representation of Lady Justice. If flaying was represented at all, it was reserved for other subjects, such as the Marsyas legend, the martyrdom of St Bartholomew and the artistic expression of anatomical structures of the human body.

This paper relies on object-based—i.e. starting from the concrete preserved works of art—research in art history. Its starting point is formed by a number of specific, too often overlooked, paintings of a particular subgenre of Flemish portraiture from before 1800. It focuses on artworks in which the commissioners had themselves portrayed in a setting of historical and allegorical motifs, or scenes that were appropriate to the group’s judicial authority or legal privileges. This contribution’s principal aim is to bring some of these paintings, together with their interpretive challenges, back into the limelight, and present a multifaceted understanding of their functions and their commissioners’ intentions.

The series Litis abusus by Hendrick Goltzius (later recast in different versions by Philips and Theodoor Galle) entails a strong moral criticism of civil litigation. Although the artist highlights conventional targets of attacks on litigation, in particular the duration and costs of civil proceedings, the litigant himself, rather than legal professionals, is the central character whose greed and acrimony are the driving forces behind his procedural obstinacy, which ultimately leads to the exhaustion of his patrimonial, physical, mental and spiritual resources. The representation of civil litigation as a monstrous predator also suggests that the system of civil procedure is per se flawed. The sequence of eight prints offers a mostly secular view of the artist’s moral censure of greed and querulous abuse of the system of justice. The addition of several Biblical quotes, at the bottom of each print, gives religious force to the general moral message of the series.

The title pages of multiple editions of the most popular German language notarial treatise from the sixteenth century, Rhetoric und Teutsch Formular, feature woodcuts depicting an array of writing utensils, sometimes complemented with a writing notary and some further tools. Those pictures bare striking similarity to the imagery used to illustrate the booming genre of practical guidebooks for artisans of various sorts. As such they bring to the fore a peculiarly materialist understanding of legal work and offer thus a welcome counterpoint to most jurisprudence. In some title pages, the composition of writing utensils is supplemented with emblematic tools of both mechanical and liberal arts thus pointing to notarial art as carrying elements of both and standing between the two. Those illustrations also match the vision of the book which in its theoretical section defines the notarial art as consisting in saving transactions and agreements from the feebleness of human memory and oblivion by giving them endurance by way of diligent writing. Overall, the book and its title page illustrations thus emphasise what is becoming the central contribution of the craft of law to the development of capitalist modernity: fixing agreements in potent writing. Understanding notarial art as the artisanship of document fabrication, those images also show the transformative power of writing.

Liberty and justice were central to the political iconography developed in the course of the French Revolution. Revolutionary iconography was introduced in the Southern Netherlands as a result of their annexation to France in the 1790s. The reception of this visual language has hitherto scarcely been investigated, despite offering valuable indications about the degree of popular acceptance of the new legal order. This chapter focuses on a rare example of a visual source that explicitly engages with the revolutionary iconography. The Tydsgebeurtenissen chronicle by the Antwerp nobleman Pierre-Antoine-Joseph Goetsbloets contains a unique collection of watercolour drawings made under the French regime. Despite his repudiation of the revolution and its principles, Goetsbloets was well acquainted with the revolutionary symbolism. Not only did he carefully copy revolutionary ceremonial into his chronicle, he also appropriated the new iconography in a subversive way. The elaborate satires he drew contained ironic reversals of the revolutionary representations of liberty and justice. By systematically undermining the revolutionary symbolism in the privacy of his chronicle, Goetsbloets created a powerful yet little-known visual counter-narrative to the French occupation of his hometown.

On the one hand, the spectator sees the judicial space as a theatre where he attends a specific play: the judicial ritual. Hence, the courtroom of the cour d’assises is a place of entertainment. On the other hand, the spectator also undergoes an experience of education and warning: by being present, he is confronted with the norms according to which society assesses behaviours, determines the limits of the tolerable, and punishes those who transgress them. He leaves trial with a message, as the initiatory architecture of the courthouse, the layout of the courtroom and the ritualised performance contribute to the expression and the transmission of a discourse on justice and, more broadly, on society. He then spreads the word, willingly or unwillingly, and as such participates in legitimising it. The public thus plays an active role in the strategy of the well-oiled machine that is the justice system.

This paper presents an iconological interpretation of the courtroom decorations in the Antwerp cour d’assises. These decorations were created between 1886 and 1893 by three traditionalist artists and a legal historian, and commissioned by a conservative Catholic judge, Théophile Smekens. In the 1880s, under the influence of the international criminology movement, Belgian criminal law started to gravitate towards the so-called ‘social defence’ theory. However, not all members of the legal and political elite agreed with the changes propagated by Adolphe Prins, and installed by Minister of Justice Jules Le Jeune. Several conservative Catholics in particular held on to a moralising view on crime and criminality. This paper argues that, in the decoration commission, Smekens demonstrated his combined artistic and legal conservatism and his opposition to recent legal changes in his choice of collaborators and iconography. This is particularly clear in town archivist Pieter Génard’s coloured reading of Antwerp criminal history and artist Pieter Van der Ouderaa’s characteristic mode of depicting this subject matter.