The pasts of law. Koselleck, Didi-Huberman and Sanmartino's Cristo velato in Naples

Abstract

The German conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck and the French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman provide two engaging if opposite ways into the fascinating world of the visual objects we live by and their relations with certain forms of justice, authority or law from the past. In this essay, I propose to explore some of their insights through the prism offered by a celebrated marble sculpture found in a small private museum in Italy and known as the Cristo velato (“Veiled Christ”). What does this artwork ‘give us to see’? I argue that the real pull of visual objects such as the Sanmartino sculpture lies in their complex temporality lending to their visible form and content an additional if decisive dimension that makes it difficult to dismiss them as simply things from a past that is now “forever gone”. All to the contrary, such objects can be traversed by multiple layers of time or, alternatively, conceal unsuspected marks that can quietly “legislate” over those who encounter them in unexpected and persistent ways. In some cases, the “images of law” we live by may even paradoxically reveal something of a striking visual prognosis from the past that is still waiting to be remembered.