Visual Ideals of Law & Justice. An Iconological inquiry into Nineteenth-Century Belgian Legal Imagery

The period known as the long 19^th century (1789-1914) is characterized as a formative phase for Belgium’s current legal system, visual culture, and nation state & democracy; by legal historians, art historians and political and cultural historians, respectively. For our current society, research has shown that we have our closest encounters with law through visual media (cinema, TV,…), and that the political elite creates symbols through which they legitimise their power. These two aspects have not been researched for Belgium’s 19^th century. Visual idea(l)s of Law and Justice bridges this gap by analysing the official imagery – monuments, prints, medals,… ordered by the government –, which had to express the political elite’s ideal of law and justice towards the mass public. Focussing on Constitutional and Criminal legal history, a corpus of images will be collected. Using the art historical method of iconological interpretation, this corpus of official legal imagery will be filed in a database; explained; and linked to its legal culture, interpreted as what the government and its actors thought the law is or should be(come). By focussing on case studies, this interdisciplinary research will thus show how Belgian 19^th-century legal culture evolved and, from a comparative perspective, differed from the scrutinized French case (legal history); how artists dealt with such official assignments (art history); and how imagery was employed by the government (cultural history).

Since 1 October, 2015, this research is funded by the Research Foundation - Flanders (FWO).

Thesis directors: This PhD research is supervised by Dirk Heirbaut, Georges Martyn (both linked with the Insitute for Legal History, UGent) and Bruno De Wever (Department of History, UGent).