25th June 2023
Here is a painting of an empty city.
It is a perfect, bright, ideal(ised) empty Renaissance cityscape.
And here is another (almost) empty though less cheerful cityscape:
It is from the great twentieth-century artist De Chirico.
Scroll up and down and compare and contrast the two urban depictions.
Similar architecture, but the latter has flawed inconsistent perspectives and a more ominous (near-)emptiness.
(You may have noticed that both the pictures above have often been banners or avatars for my social media accounts.)
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Much of practical law and policy commentary offers a contrast between ideal systems, on one hand, and the incoherence and contradictions of reality, on another.
That is: between how things should work and how they do (and don’t) work – between the ideal Renaissance City and a latter day De Chirico city.
I have also spent most of my life in and around large cities, and so much of my writing carries urban perspectives – which, again like perspectives in a De Chirico painting, don’t always neatly join in the middle.
Anyway, this is just a way of saying I have changed the name of my Substack to Empty City.
I like the new name, and I hope you don’t mind it too.
And if you can subscribe at the Substack, that would be wonderful.
It’s a wonderful title and will lend itself well to irony and paradox. I love de Chirico and his potent emptinesses and have long wanted to paint like him, or Hopper, another master of tense spaces, but my architectural lines are anything but and I’m better working more loosely.
The surname is actually [De] Chirico.
I have corrected this horrible mistake – and I hope those who were irked by this can forgive me.
I grew up in Leeds, and enjoy cities (esp. Glasgow) but the Renaissance one (the Urbino) scares the crap out of me.
Not totally sure why, but two things contribute; one is the Albert Speer-like monumentalism. The other is that religious looking building at the heart of it, and those two little pediment or dais things. Gives me the Giordano Bruno shivers. You half-expect to see a parade of red-robed, white-headscarfed handmaids emerge from the temple, to witness one of them being burned at the stake on each of the pediments. I’m a believer, but a liberal one, and I really don’t like the ‘marriage of Church and State’ connotations of it.
But the messy interface between ‘is’ and ‘should’ .. I’m absolutely on board for that.
You have triggered trains of thought and discussion which may require you to start an art-history blog for lawyers, political commentators and interested onlookers
A close look at the Renaissance townscape reveals traces of vegetation, possibly self-seeded in some cases, as if the place was evacuated a year or two earlier in fear of a disaster, whose announcement came just after the street-cleaners had passed by doing an excellent job.
This may all serve as some kind of metaphor for the current state of law and politics, but if so, it escapes me for the moment.