Jurisprudence

For the Metzenbaum Courthouse in Cleveland, Ohio, Daniel Chester French created Jurisprudence and Commerce, a pair of Tennessee pink marble (a type of limestone) sculptures that anchor the corners of the building’s main façade.  Like the architecture of the courthouse itself, French’s monumental sculptures epitomize the stylistic and cultural goals of the American Renaissance, the artistic era that prevailed at the time of the courthouse’s construction.  Many artists and architects who worked during the American Renaissance borrowed freely from classical Greek and Roman motifs.  These elements were deemed especially appropriate for the United States because the nation was viewed as heir to Greek democracy and Roman law. 

Other important influences came from the Italian Renaissance, a time when artists collaborated with architects to create outstanding examples of public art that extolled civic virtue.  As had been the case in the Italian Renaissance, artists who worked during the American Renaissance frequently were drawn to allegorical subjects, in which human figures symbolize honorable abstract ideas. Far more often than not, American Renaissance allegorical figures are female, because the common viewpoint of the period maintained that womanhood embodied purity.  Such is the case with Jurisprudence and Commerce. 

Jurisprudence presents the coolly impassive female figure of Justice—her eyes are closed to imply her impartiality—who is flanked by a mother and son on one side, and a grimacing felon in chains on the other.  The mother and child pair represents protection under the law, whereas the man in chains symbolizes the law’s wrath.  Justice rests her left foot on a stack of large books, perhaps meant to imply her inherent wisdom.  In her right arm she prominently displays a tablet emblazoned at the top with LEX, the Latin word for law, and engraved with its attributes: justice, equity, authority, wisdom, piety, security, liberty, firmness, honesty and trust.  In the companion sculpture, the female figure of Commerce holds a model of a state-of-the-art steamship in her right arm while resting her left arm against a globe that symbolizes the world.  Her right foot rest upon a hay bale representing cargo.  She is accompanied by personifications of Electricity, who clutches a magnet, and Steam, who grasps a train wheel. Because the composition combines a traditional allegorical figure with attributes that are conspicuously modern, Commerce reflects a key hallmark of the American Renaissance, whereby the present was optimistically viewed to be a seamless and rightful beneficiary of the glorious past.