Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

An Introduction to Iconographical Studies of Legal History 93
are literally looking over the shoulders of their forefathers at what is coming to
them. The pillars in the hall suggest a public room. In the series of tiles they
are often used to indicate a courtroom. The group of four is enclosed by men
who are dressed like lawyers in the second half of the seventeenth century.
The man at the left is talking to one.
To grasp the meaning of this special setting, with the courtroom, the lawyers
and group of two at the left, one has to know that a fervent discussion was
carried on between prominent seventeenth-century Dutch lawyers on whether
the counting of the generations ought to start with the fideicommissary heir,
or with the heir in trust. In practice it caused many lawsuits. The man with
the beret on the left with his lawyer symbolizes the uncertain fourth heir.
Besides being an aid to memory for a family fideicommissum, this design is a
representation of an open legal question and a warning of the troubles which
the establishing of a family fideicommissum could cause.
The third example (Illustration 6) has a political implication in addition
to its legal aspects. In 1695, less than ten years after the failure of the tile
project, Romeyn de Hooghe, a well-known Dutch engraver, who studied
law at the university of Leiden, published a book containing 432 etchings,
depicting the titles of the Pandects, each etching accompanied by a short
explanation. They serve the same mnemotechnic purpose as the tiles. The
example reproduced is taken from book 40, concerning manumission. In the
etching we see a man in whose hand there is a will with a picture of a hat.
In front of him is a man in a loincloth with a bald head. An explanation is
given: 'pileus libertatem notaf. For both the hat and the bald head 36 we find
an explanation in Ripa's Iconologia: 37 'After the head of a slave who was to
be freed was shaven he was made to wear a hat. And this ceremony took
place in the temple of a goddess called Feronia, 38 who was the tutelary deity of
slaves'. The etching shows us a master promising his slave to free him by will.
Looking at the pictures of the manumission we notice that the hats of masters
and of freedmen differ considerably. The text, however, gives no explanation.
Literature on the history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century fashion tells us
that the hat for the freedman was called a Spanish hat, fashionable during the
Dutch war of liberation against the Spaniards, some eighty years earlier. 39 It
cannot be a coincidence that Romeyn de Hooghe chose this particular hat,
which reminded spectators of the time that the Dutch had no political rights,
as a symbol of manumission for the Roman freedman who also had no political
36 The hat as a symbol of freedom is only rarely mentioned in the written legal sources and the shaven
head not at all. I have found the pileus only in CJ. 7.2.10 and 7.6.1.5. In Latin literature the pileus is
well known (for example, Livy xxiv, 16; xxx, 45.5; Petronius, Sat., 41; Tertullian, Spect., 21-22),
and in art and on coins and medallions the hat as a symbol of freedom is very often found in the
course of the centuries.
37 C. Ripa, Iconologia of Uijtbeeldinghe des verstants (Amsterdam, 1644), 573-74. In the
Netherlands this book was very popular among seventeenth- and eighteenth-century artists.
38 Feronia is probably a goddess of Etruscan origin.
39 F.W.S. van Thienen, Studien zur Kostumgeschichte in der Bliitezeit Hollands (Berlin, 1929).