Drawings and the Law in Early Modern Southern Europe

Abstract

How did drawings intersect with the law in the early modern period? This dissertation—an intervention in the history of drawing—investigates the ways in which drawings were created and commissioned by artists and architects for use within legal practice and jurisdiction. It further examines how, during the early modern period, legal practitioners themselves began to adopt drawing as a technique for producing knowledge and informing legal decision-making. The study focuses on Southern Europe, with particular attention to the interconnected regions of early modern Italy, Spain, and the Spanish Americas, as shaped by the administrative structures of the Spanish imperial system. Within this jurisdictional framework, drawings were submitted to courts and tribunals, seized by judicial authorities, and embedded in legal documents such as contracts, petitions, and records of litigation and criminal trials. By uncovering the histories of their creation and use, this study traces the complex, contested, and often contradictory relationship between drawn images and the development of legal thought. Grounded in a substantial body of previously unpublished material, the thesis constructs a taxonomy of drawings employed in legal contexts, encompassing a wide array of graphic systems and visual representations—from contract drawings and narrative compositions to maps, plans, trace drawings, and pictographs. It demonstrates that these visual forms not only complemented legal texts but, in some cases, supplanted them, embodying both juridical reasoning and affective appeal. By uncovering a shared manuscript culture among artistic and legal practitioners, the dissertation advances a call for a new hermeneutics of early modern legal and artistic practice—one that recognizes drawing as a parallel mode of legal reasoning and artistic expression. The dissertation unfolds across three chapters. Chapter 1 presents the first visual and material history of the early modern contract in Southern Europe, examining the entanglement of contract-making and art-making through contract drawings. It situates these visual practices within reconsidered and evolving legal concepts in early modern contract theory, including bona fides, aequitas, and consensus. Chapter 2 investigates the role of drawings in criminal courts, with a focus on their epistemic in legal reasoning and forensic procedures. Centered on the Tribunal of the Governor in Rome, this chapter demonstrates how drawings operated as instruments of inquiry, judicial truth-finding, and legal argumentation in cases ranging from property disputes to sodomy and homicide trials. Chapter 3 turns to the use of drawings in petitions and testaments, examining how visual languages contributed to the formation of legal identity and personhood within the colonial legal framework. It traces evolving modes of narrative representation and the emergence of a concept of “visual citizenship” across the Spanish Empire’s polycentric legal structure. Interdisciplinary in scope, this study contributes to a transregional and cross-cultural art history of drawing—one that considers European visual traditions as instruments of colonial legal authority, while also attending to how they were reshaped by imagery emerging from cross-cultural contact. Set against a backdrop of legal and geopolitical transformation—including the revival of Roman law, the expansion of trade networks, and shifting ethical-legal frameworks shaped by the realities of conquest and colonial rule—this dissertation argues that the early modern period marked a pivotal moment when drawing and law-making became intricately intertwined. By foregrounding the juridical functions of drawing, it offers a new perspective on how visual practices participated in the consolidation of legal systems across early modern Southern Europe and the Atlanto-Mediterranean world.