Figuring out justice in dark times: on law, history, and the visual

Abstract

ABSTRACT What happens when we approach certain objects heuristically as images? How is one to orient oneself through such images? Might those images challenge our existing knowledge of the history of modernisation and written rationalisation of law after the Middle Ages? In this essay, I begin with certain early modern European artworks - paintings, engravings, woodcuts, and drawings - as well as some other less obvious objects - a striking black background in the portrait of a little-known physician, a compelling account of a nocturnal attempt to figure out justice at critical times, the gripping intensity permeating Dürer's allegories of justice, and so on - and investigate the force those objects may have as images. Overall, the intention is to go beyond treating such objects as impassive historical evidence of the particular effort to conceive law intellectually or, alternatively, as codes for certain preexisting messages to be subsequently decoded. On approaching them differently, we may discover that such objects can sometimes resist our analyses or interpretations forcing us to engage with them in unexpected ways.