Danse Macabre
Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts

A revolutionary approach exploring legal themes such as justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, and power through close readings of major works of art.

Desmond Manderson (Author)

9781316611265, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 17 December 2020

307 pages, 56 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm, 0.415 kg

'Drawing on recent psychoanalytical, hermeneutic and phenomenological approaches to the histories of art, Manderson weaves a history of the law from 1500 to the present day - a history that neither progresses nor unravels but keeps returning to the archetypal, indeed holy, trinity of law, death and time, which he argues inhabits and manifests in art. Through a close and extended reading of his chosen artworks, and through the innovative methodologies he uses to unpack them, Manderson's chapters build like symphonic movements into a veritable masterclass in the historiography of art. Art, Manderson argues, cannot escape the deathly grip of the law and its temporality - a grip, he argues, that will always entice and elude us.' Ian McLean, Hugh Ramsay Chair of Australian Art History, University of Melbourne

The visual arts offer refreshing and novel resources through which to understand the representation, power, ideology and critique of law. This vibrantly interdisciplinary book brings the burgeoning field to a new maturity through extended close readings of major works by artists from Pieter Bruegel and Gustav Klimt to Gordon Bennett and Rafael Cauduro. At each point, the author puts these works of art into a complex dance with legal and social history, and with recent developments in legal and art theory. Manderson uses the idea of time and temporality as a focal point through which to explore how the work of art engages with and constitutes law and human lives. In the symmetries and asymmetries caused by the vibrating harmonic resonances of these triple forces - time, law, art - lies a way of not only understanding the world, but also transforming it.

Foreword
1. Bruegel's 'Justice': anachronic time
2. Reynolds's justice, Blackstone's laws: diachronic time
3. Governor Arthur's proclamation: utopian time
4. Turner's 'Slave Ship': now time
5. Klimt's 'Jurisprudence': suspended time
6. Bennett's laws: colonial time
7. Cauduro's crimes: ectoplasmic time
Afterword.

Subject Areas: Social law [LNT], Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], The arts: general issues [AB]