Supreme Court Chamber, Pennsylvania State Capitol, "The Opening of the Book of the Law"

To view Violet Oakley’s tour of the Capitol murals in Harrisburg, 1955, please click here.

The third and final room that Violet Oakley decorated at the Pennsylvania State Capitol, the Supreme Court Chamber was the most innovative of her mural series. Conceived while she was writing The Holy Experiment: A Message to the World from Pennsylvania, an illustrated portfolio describing her murals in the Governor’s Grand Executive Reception Room and the Senate Chamber, the murals in the Supreme Court Chamber represent the pages of a book on the history of law. The unusual visual concept appears in one of Oakley’s references, Roman Law in Medieval Europe, which described the medieval practice of engraving law texts on walls where they could be continually reevaluated.¹ By adopting this idea in mural painting, the history of the law is an open book perpetually before the eyes of the Supreme Court justices.

The Opening of the Book of the Law unfolds in sixteen panels on terra cotta–colored walls above the nine-foot mahogany wainscot. Light from an opalescent stained glass dome designed with green and amber foliage by Alfred Godwin imbues the room with an outdoor ambience. Oakley designed each panel on a light ground with a pictorial field, calligraphic text, and decorative border in high-keyed hues that complement the color scheme of architectural interior.

Like Dante, whose Divine Comedy she revered, Oakley layered her text with numerical symbolism and musical analogies. She reconfigures the categories of law as an octave that she illustrates in the mural The Octave (The Scale of the Law and Its Harmonies) inscribed with the musical notation of the E-major scale: Divine Law (E), Law of Nature (F#), Revealed Law (G#), Law of Reason (A), Common Law (B), Law of Nations (C#), International Law (D#), and Divine Law (E) returning an octave higher.

As in the three books of the Divine Comedy, Oakley organizes the history of the law in three triads. Three murals illustrate revealed law among Greeks (Themistes), Hebrews (Decalogue), and Christians (Beatitudes). Three lawgivers—Emperor Justinian, William Penn, and William Blackstone—codify the laws of government. And three courts set precedents for international law: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court under Chief Justice Thomas McKean, the United States Supreme Court under John Marshall, and the newly established International Court of Justice at The Hague. A final panel depicts Disarmament, the result of international cooperation. “Now we have the culmination of the series, developing the theme The Opening of the Book of the Law,” Chief Justice Robert von Moschzisker explained at the dedication of the murals on May 23, 1927, “which marks the evolution of law, beginning with the panel on Divine Law, over the entrance door, and ending with the Spirit of the Law, so beautifully symbolized by Christ walking upon a troubled sea filled with sinking ships of strife.”²

Divine Law is an enigmatic cosmological image composed of interlacing manuscripts. Against a background of stars and sea, the face of a goddess reminiscent of Botticelli’s Venus Rising from the Sea can be seen through entwined letters. “A great monogram is made by the illuminated letters LAW,” Oakley explained. “Subsidiary letters forming the words ‘Love and Wisdom’ are put in place by the winged figures of the seraphim and cherubim in red and blue.”³

In Penn, The Law-Giver, the visionary founder of Pennsylvania writes at his desk beneath a lantern symbolizing the “Inner Light.” Arrayed on stairs behind him are the thinkers who inspired him and whom he inspired: George Fox, founder of the Society of Friends; Sir Thomas More, author of Utopia; John Milton, with Paradise Regained; Grotius, the father of International Law; Henry IV of France; John Locke, the English philosopher; Sir Algernon Sydney, the English Whig politician; President Woodrow Wilson; and Dante. In the manner of Renaissance painters, Oakley inserted a self-portrait: at the top of the staircase on the left, behind Wilson, she holds her “Book of the Law.”

“When her task was done,” wrote Malcolm Vaughn in the New York Herald Tribune, “Violet Oakley had raised in the Capitol of Pennsylvania an International Altar to the Victory of LAW over force.”⁴ Twenty years later, she was awarded an honorary doctorate in law from Drexel University for her murals in the Supreme Court Chamber.

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¹ Paul Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Medieval Europe (London and New York: Harper and Brothers, 1909): 55; Violet Oakley, The Holy Experiment: Our Heritage from William Penn, 1644–1944 (Philadelphia: Cogslea Studio Publications, 1950): 108, 111.

² Ibid. 107.

³ Ibid. 110.

⁴ Ibid. 158.