LAUSR

The Eyes of Justice investigates the changes of the concept of justice through its historical representations since antiquity to the present. Unlike other historical and philosophical studies, this book engages in a historical research on political iconography that surveys the metamorphoses of the concept of justice ‘in social life and cultural history’ (15). In examining the paintings of Andrea Alciato, Cesare Giglio, Batista Fiera, Vincenzo Catari or Albrecht Dürer together with the writings of authors such as Cesare Beccaria, Franz Kafka or John Rawls, José M. González García, a research professor of philosophy at Spain’s National Research Council, combines Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology with the iconological analysis developed by Erwin Panofsky and the tools of interpretative art of Aby Warburg (5). The result is a novel insight into the diachronic representation of the idea, indeed the ideas, of justice. Metaphors, and not thematic similarities, bridge the temporal gaps between works of art, and their underlying conceptual debates, belonging to different historical epochs. The analysis draws from an epistemological assumption: ‘everything we can know about emblems, the changing meaning of symbols, as well as animalistic and transcendental representations, is shared with us; and we can lose ourselves in the particularities with each new chain of themes and each new image’ (6). Thus, the author argues that core concepts in the history of legal and political thought, as in the case of justice, only can be properly understood in the light of those contributions that shaped the conceptual framework in a specific historical period. Visual metaphors, the author argues, provide a necessary knowledge about the uses of ideas. Conversely, without images the understanding that we achieve of intellectual issues remain unfinished, if not distorted. In this sense, the book describes eight major changes in the representations of justice, each one identifying a definite tradition of the idea of justice.