BOOK: Giovanni ROSSI and Pietro SCHIRÒ (eds.), Law and Art in the 19th Century. Power in Images (Pisa: Pacini Editore, 2024) ISBN: 978-88-3379-685-7, 520 pp., €57,00

 

(Source: Pacini Editore)

ABOUT THE BOOK

This volume deals with the figurative representation of law and power in the 19th Century, emphasising the importance of images and, thus, of the iconographic representation of themes and concepts pivotal to law in 19th-century Europe. The twenty collected contributions examine multiple topics connected to different forms of artistic expression and investigate how painting, sculpture, and architecture reproduced a peculiar vision of law and power, sometimes to amplify its importance, sometimes to formulate an open critique.

The volume analyses a series of case studies to focus, with a comparative and multidisciplinary approach, on the ways in which the emergence of a new juridical experience in 19th-century Europe led to the replacement – or re-semanticisation – of symbols and images traditionally associated with law and power, in order to express and propose to the society of the time a new conception of the law.

 Sono presenti nell’opera testi diversi in italiano, inglese e francese. 

Table of contents available here.

SEMINAR: Representing Justice: Aesthetics of Law and the Visual arts in Italy during the Fascist period (Stanford: Stanford Center for Law and History, 16 APR 2024 h. 12:45-2:00 PM Pacific), [IN PERSON AND ONLINE]

(Image source: Palazzo di Giustizia di Milano on Wikimedia)

Professor Luigi Lacchè, Full Professor in Legal History at the University of Macerata, Department of Law and at the LUISS University, Dept. of Law, Rome, will present, "Representing Justice: Aesthetics of Law and the Visual arts in Italy during the Fascist period." Lacchè will present in-person but participants will be able to attend either in-person or online.

ABSTRACT 

The paper aims at presenting some outcomes of a work in progress (a book) on Italian criminal justice during the fascist era. Justice is not usually considered among the most important pillars of the fascist regime. Conversely, I think that it played an important function in term of repression, consolidation and innovation. In particular, it is useful to understand what it was that justice represented for fascism, what kind of innovations the regime introduced, and why it introduced them, and how it tried to model a particular shape and intrinsically fascist representation of justice. This theme is multifaceted, therefore it is impossible to offer here a complete picture. In this paper I can only select one of the research perspectives, namely, the representations of justice that involve images and the aesthetics of law also. The new fascist justice and legislation (Rocco’s codes above all) needed new spaces in which to celebrate and represent the "justice regime" in line with the directives and cultural and "aesthetic" politics of fascism. If architecture is one of the most recurrent metaphor-images of law, it is in fact central also to the semantic system of fascist law.

To RSVP, click here. Those who confirm their attendance will receive a separate email containing the paper and link to the event after the RSVP deadline.

More information can be found here.