Punishment in the Frame: Rethinking the History and Sociology of Art

Images of punishment have featured prominently in Western art and this article explores what might be learnt from studying such pictures of suffering. It seeks to develop an approach to the visual that avoids both the essentialism of art history and the reductionism of sociology by offering a rethinking of the relationships between the two. It begins by setting out the current state of the sociology of art, before discussing ‘new’ art histories that are inspired by social analysis. It then concentrates on how images of punishment have featured in Western art. This substantive material provides a rich resource to understand the force of representation and offers an opportunity to develop an aesthetic sociology that avoids some of the problems identified in the article. The approach developed in the second part is one that seeks to elaborate an aesthetic sociology that combines a historical sensitivity to images with the analytical concerns of social science. It strives to extend the art historian Michael Baxandall’s writings toward more sociological interpretations of visual analysis

Memory before Modernity: Cultures and Practices in Early Modern Germany

Collective identities and transnational networks in medieval and early modern Europe, 1000-180

A ghostly corpse in the city. Spatial configurations and iconographic representations of capital punishment in the 'Belgian Space'

This contribution addresses the complex relation between ‘sovereign’ power, legitimate State violence, and public space in the ‘Belgian’ territories. By linking the spatiality of the execution and its iconographic representation to changing socio-political power configurations, it studies the role of the Belgian ‘culture of capital executions’ in its specific path of State formation. The trend of removing the death penalty from the communal agora is a general issue in the West. From the Middle Ages, capital executions were characterised by specific appropriations of space by central authorities, local elites and ordinary citizens. During the eighteenth century, local powers faced attempts of the central governments to control the public execution, and more specifically the death penalty. Data from the 1770s to the 1850s, during several quickly succeeding political regimes, supports the hypothesis of a decline of publicly exposed death penalties. In nineteenth century Belgium, the gradual disappearance of the public execution as a spectacular expression of the State runs parallel with the (all but) inexistence of an iconography’ of public executions. The guillotine appears as the expression of a change in criminal justice and it also influences the representation of capital execution. It focuses now on the cutted head, the seat of the mental faculties. During the same period, cell confinement is considered by the State as a mean of control the criminal's mind