A gallery of illustrious jurists

Michael Widener

One of the first portrait albums ever published featured Italy’s outstanding jurists, Antoine Lafréry’s Illustrium iureconsultorum imagenes (Rome, 1566?). The book consists of 25 portraits, attributed to Niccolò Nelli, that reportedly were based on a set of portraits in the collection of Mantova Benavides, a jurist in Padua. The volume is one of the treasures of the Lillian Goldman Law Library’s Rare Book Collection.

Scanned images of all the portraits are now up in the Law Library’s Flickr site. The portraits are of leading jurists from the 13th to 16th centuries, and include such famous names as Accursius (ca. 1182-1260), the compiler of the standard gloss to the Corpus Juris Civilis, Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1313-1357), and the Renaissance humanist Andrea Alciati (1492-1550). In the midst of the 24 jurists’ portraits is, inexplicably, the image of Dante Alighieri. Below is the portrait of Gerolamo Cagnolo (1491-1551), author of commentaries on the Digest and Code of Justinian.

MIKE WIDENER

Rare Book Librarian

Related News

This is admirably well performed in lord chief baron Gilbert’s excellent treatise of evidence; a work which it is impossible to abstract or abridge...
Rare Books Blog
Follow the Yale Law Library's " Tools of Industry" exhibit on Yale Law's Instagram! In a height-defying film by the Yale Law School's Office of Public...
Rare Books Blog
Featured in Yale Today, the Yale Law Library's current rare book exhibit will be on view through January 14 in the Lillian Goldman Law Library's rare...