Allegorische voorstelling met personificatie van gerechtigheid en rechtsgeleerden 1696 - 16961

This Allegorical Representation with Personification of Justice and Lawyers by Abraham de Blois, is an etching. You can see from the image, it's built of lines, almost like threads woven together. Looking at how the artist used hatching and cross-hatching, especially in the folds of the robes, there's a real sense of depth, but it's also very linear and flat at the same time. The light and shadow, they're not really about modeling form, but about creating a kind of symbolic space. Look at the way the books are stacked and scattered; it’s all so carefully arranged, and yet it gives the impression of being totally spontaneous. It makes me think of Piranesi, actually, with his impossible architectural spaces and dense textures. But where Piranesi is all about the grandeur and decay of Rome, de Blois is using a similar language to talk about law and justice. The density, the complexity, the weight of all those lines—it's like a metaphor for the legal system itself. It suggests an ongoing conversation about the nature of representation, and the difference between art and life.