ABSTRACT
The sixteenth-century legal humanist Alciatus defines the concept of an image in a classical aphorism: Quid est pictura? Veritas falsa. 1 The significance of this concept of image is embedded in a complex tradition of doctrinal writing upon the question of signs, representations and personality. At its strongest, the legal definition of the person (ius personarum) is determined by the theory of images as the form of human appearance, of human presence. The legal person is a mask (persona) and that mask is governed in its representation—so also in its rights and capacities—by the law of the image (ius imaginum) and the drama of masks. It is, first, a law of the imago, of lineage, of the succession of the paternal form through each generation, symbolised in the household by the pride of place given to the painted death-mask—the effigy—of the ancestral father. It was also, in more mundane terms, a question of likeness, of imitation, through which the image gave a face to things and so semblance to inchoate matter. In these terms, the legal subject itself is in one respect to be understood or recognised as a visual fiction drawn upon the natural person, and is defined by dogmatic tradition as simulacra fugacia…repercussae imaginis umbra, and later, to use Alciatus again, as mens incarnata, fantasma temporis, speculator vitae. 2
