The Art of Law: artistic representations and iconography of law and justice in context, from the middle ages to the first world war

Abstract

The ambitions of The Art of Law are substantial. The subtitle – ‘Artistic Representations and Iconography of Law and Justice in Context, from the Middle Ages to the First World War’ – makes plain the breadth of the aspirations. The editors brought together European legal historians, art historians and semioticians to explore the import of shared and overlapping visual traditions. The introduction explains that the book grew out of an art exhibition held in Bruges, the site of the extraordinary 1498 Gerard David painting of the Judgment of Cambyses, and discussed in Chapters Two and Seven. The story comes from the Historiae, written by Herodotus around 440 BCE and describing the rule of King Cambyses, said to have lived some hundred years earlier. According to Herodotus, upon learning that the judge, Sisamnes, was corrupt, Cambyses ordered him flayed alive. Thereafter, Cambyses appointed Otanes, the son of Sisamnes, to serve as a jurist and forced the son to preside on a seat made from the skin of his father. From the thirteenth century onward, versions of this narrative were reiterated in European compilations of classical stories and, by the seventeenth century, regularly portrayed in European town halls. Dozens of images exist, but the vividness of the Judgment of Cambyses by the Flemish artist David is noteworthy. Competing interpretations exist of both the Cambyses story and the reasons for its