Dear Students,
next week classes will be held by Prof. Georges Martyn (Gent).
The main theme around which the three lectures will be developed is law and iconography.
How are law and iconography related?
Here following you'll find some helpful introductory remarks on the law and iconography discourse (with a selection of suggested readings) - Buon lavoro!
Law and Iconography
‘Law’ and ‘image(s)’ interact in many
ways. Traffic signs, for instance, are at the same time ‘rules’ and ‘images’.
Legislation on the protection of minors prohibits and penalizes the exhibition
of pornographic material, artists risk to be held civilly liable when offending
individuals or protected minorities by laughing at them in cartoons, etc. There
is actually a lot of ‘law on art’, and all of these rules can be seen as part and
parcel of the vast research field of ‘law and iconography’. However, subject of
the three lessons in Rome will not be ‘law on art’, but rather ‘art on law’. This
theme will be studied from a historical point of view. What will be focused on,
is the representation of law, justice, legislation, and other legal concepts…
Three themes will be treated.
The verticality of the law: how art is used to legitimize judicial power. Looking at the ‘places of justice administration’, starting
under a tree in prehistoric times, passing by the medieval church entrances
(with their red painted western doors) and the Renaissance painting of divine
and historical exempla iustitiae,
over the ‘templar’ architecture of nineteenth century palaces of justice, to
the present day transparent office buildings of our contemporary courts, there
is a connecting thread: worldly men (and recently women) deciding cases over
their compatriots, try to legitimize their power by stressing the ‘higher’
origin of their competence. In the early middle ages, before Christianisation,
the biggest tree of the village served as a gathering place for all important
questions. The tree reaching to the sky, was replaced by the church and the
religious legitimating of the judges’ competence was represented by
Crucifixions and Last Judgments in the late middle ages. Again, the source of
power was sought ‘above’, in heaven. Even after the French and American revolutions,
the palaces of justice still resembled temples of worship. Although today,
legitimising representations are far more scarce, we do still use expressions
like: ‘Be you ever so high, the law is always above you’ (Thomas Fuller-Lord
Denning). The verticality is still present today, be it for instance in the
symbol of Lady Justice’s sword, ...and even in her blindfold (blind to the
temporal world, she should only listen to the voice of God, the voice of
fairness and truth), but in earlier times we found it also in justice trees,
pillories, belfries, etc.
Readings:
· G. Martyn, “Inspiring Images for
Judges. Late Medieval Court Room Decorations in the Southern Netherlands”, in
A. Kérchy, A. Kiss & G. Szönyi (eds.), The
Iconology of Law and Order (Legal and Cosmic), in Papers in English & American Studies, XXI, Szeged (Hungary),
Jatepress, 2012, 41-53 (https://www.academia.edu/4514582/124_Inspiring_Images_PRINTING_PROOF_not_for_distribution_WRONG_PAGES_should_be_41_to_53).
Signs, symbols, gestures and tools: legally telling details in
(religious and profane) art. Lady
Justice’s blindfold, sword and scales, an ‘iconographic construction’ of the
Renaissance, are still understood today as symbols of justice and law. Many
other symbols and signs, however, but also objects and (portrayed) gestures, in
our contemporary eyes, do no longer spread the message they sent to spectators
in earlier centuries. It is an interesting quest for jurists and legal
historians to go and visit museums, using ‘legal (historical) spectacles’. Artistic
iconography was undoubtedly influenced by law. Left and right, for instance,
have an important legal meaning; the overall (religious) influence of the
antithesis ‘good and bad’ was paramount; colours of cloths can tell us about
the goodness or badness of the persons wearing them; a branch of a tree can
tell us that the man holding it is a judicial officer; the use of a glove can
refer to marriage, etc. Very few paintings or other works of art explicitly
deal with law and justice as such, but quite often, juridical elements are
present, be it very often as hazardous details. A classical example is the
depiction of the Gospel’s scene of Jesus being brought before Pontius Pilate.
Although this story is to be situated in the first century, many artists show
Pilate as a medieval, early modern or modern judge. This way, we get to know
the robes of the judges, their bench, their symbols... We can probably ‘trust’
these representations more – as they are just unimportant details slipping in
without thinking about them – than, for instance, the many representations of
torture and execution, represented in paintings, drawings and statuary of
saints and martyrs. If we compare these representations to marginal drawings by
court clerks, for instance, we should conclude that a lot of artistic
exaggeration was used for religious purposes.
Readings:
Jurists exalted and fooled: For centuries artistic creation was all about religion..., all or almost
all, only the king and the higher nobility being able to command portraits. It
is striking that jurists were the first non-nobles and non-religious to have
their portraits painted. This tells a lot about the social positions jurists
were able to rise to, being professors, councillors, judges and advocates. But
pretty soon, the juridical guild was also criticised, in songs and stories, but
also in pictorial art. We see them represented as vultures, foxes, wolves and
monkeys. Especially their hunger for money is portrayed.
Images indeed can be used to both
exalt and fool the men of law.
Readings:
Prof. Martyn's CV:
Biography: Georges Martyn (born in Avelgem, Belgium, 1966) studied Law
(1984-89) and Medieval Studies (1989-91) in Kortrijk and Leuven (Belgium) and
obtained a Ph.D. degree in Law at the Catholic University of Leuven in 1996,
with a dissertation on private law legislation in the early modern Netherlands.
He has been an ‘advocaat’
(barrister/lawyer) between 1992 and 2008 at the bar of Kortrijk, is now
honorary member of the Ghent bar, and is a substitute justice of the peace in
Kortrijk since 1999. He is full professor at the University of Ghent
(Department of Jurisprudence and Legal History) since 1999 and leads the
Institute of Legal History (www.rechtsgeschiedenis.be) since 2010. He teaches ‘History of Politics and
Public Law’, ‘General Introduction to Belgian Law’ and ‘Legal Methodology’. His
publications deal with the history of private law and legal institutions in the
Netherlands in the early modern era, the reception of Roman law, the legal
professions, the evolution of the sources of the law in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries and legal iconography. He was appointed by royal decree a
member of the Belgian Royal Commission for the Edition of the Old Law (http://justitie.belgium.be/nl/informatie/bibliotheek/koninklijke_commissie_uitgave_belgische_oude_wetten_en_verordeningen/), he is the Flemish editor-in-chief of the
Belgian-Dutch legal history review Pro
Memorie (http://www.verloren.nl/pro-memorie) and co-editor of the series Studies in the History of Law and Justice (http://www.springer.com/series/11794). Bibliography on the Ghent University website (https://biblio.ugent.be/person/801001322489) and Academia.edu.
