Cristina Martinez |
Cristina S. Martinez holds a PhD in Art History and Law from Birkbeck College, University of London, and completed a two-year Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Toronto. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa and a faculty member of the International Summer Institute for the Cultural Study of Law, University of Osnabrück, Germany.
Her research focuses on eighteenth-century art and culture, especially British art, and the historical interactions between visuality and law. She is also interested in contemporary art, appropriation and copyright law. She is currently working on her book ‘Art, Law and Order: The Legal Life of Artists in Eighteenth-century Britain’ which will be published by Manchester University Press. The forthcoming book has been recognized by the Historians of British Art with its annual Publication Award. She has also received research grant support from the Terra Foundation for the Arts, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Scottish Society of Art History, the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, the Commonwealth Fellowship Plan and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2013, she was a research fellow at the Lewis Walpole Library and, in 2014, she was a Visiting Scholar at the Yale Center for British Art. She has published and presented work on Sir Joshua Reynolds and in the area of copyright law and the visual arts. For example, her piece ‘Justice and Art, Face to Face’ (co-authored with Desmond Manderson), which explores the question of the relationship between portraiture and justice, will be published in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities. In 2014, she contributed to the collection edited by Wilfrid Prest, Re-Interpreting Blackstone's Commentaries and, in 2015, she was invited to give a talk as part of the exhibition commemorating the 250th anniversary of William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law’s of England organized by the Yale School of Law and the Lillian Goldman Law Library. Most recently, she was invited to contribute a piece on the printseller and legal petitioner Jane Hogarth to the book 250 Years on: New Light on William Hogarth, edited by Bernd W. Krysmanski, and her article ‘An Emblematic Representation of Law: Hogarth and the Visible Manifestation of the Engravers’ Act’ will be published in a forthcoming collection of essays entitled Law and the Visual: Transition, Transformation, and Transmission, edited by Desmond Manderson. |
law at the margin of
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The Engravers’ Act, known as Hogarth’s Act, aimed to protect the work of engravers from piracy and regulate the print market. Under the provisions of the Act, the appearance of the date of publication and the name of the proprietor were necessary to the legal protection of the image. The words ‘Published according to Act of Parliament’ or any of its variants – ‘as the Act directs’, ‘according to a late Act’, ‘according to law’ – were also included in the so-called publication line. What does the appearance of law, at the margin of prints, reveal about the juridical sphere and the status of the image? My paper investigates the role and presence of law in prints and maps in eighteenth-century Britain. It raises the question of the marginal status of prints which occupied a position at the bottom of the hierarchy of academic genres and, importantly, formed a bond with law. The relation of centre and margin, as I wish to demonstrate, lies at the heart of the relationship between law and art. |