Baroque spectacle and the legal imaginary: authority, performance, and the visual

In the Baroque imagination, the theatrum mundi metaphor – the vision of the world as a great stage – served as an epistemic and aesthetic framework through which jurists sought to visualize and legitimise authority. The purpose of this article is to trace how the Baroque fascination with spectacle transformed the theatre into a cognitive and political device, turning legality into a visible, persuasive, and performative medium. Law, in turn, appeared as a ‘staged reality’, an aesthetic phenomenon unfolding in public, where its legitimacy was constantly re-enacted through elaborate scenographic techniques. Drawing on key Baroque thinkers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Giovanni Battista De Luca, this article reveals how this theatrical paradigm operated as both an epistemic structure and an artistic medium, contributing to a radical reconfiguration of legal discourse. Frontispieces and emblems became crucial sites where the Baroque imagination of law took visual form. Through a close examination of selected examples, the study traces the visual and performative logic by which juridical authority was translated into image, allowing legality itself to appear as performance.