About ‘The Empty City’ as a title for this blog

3rd March 2026

As you may have noticed this blog has a new name to go with its new domain. The name is the same as my Substack, but I thought I should explain it as the title of a blog about law (and lore) and policy.

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(Spoiler warning for Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.)

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Compare and contrast these two paintings.

The first is one of the Renaissance “ideal city” paintings.

Nobody knows for certain who the painter is, so I will call them “the Renaissance Master” for this post.

You will notice that the painting has regular lines of perspective and a set vanishing point; it also has proportionate, idealised architecture; and it has welcoming and well-lit colonnades and arcades.

And you will notice it has no people.

Nor shadows.

For me this painting conveys a place (and polity) in its idealised form: how it should be, at least to some people.

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The second painting is Mystery and Melancholy of a Street by Giorgio de Chirico.

Here there are no regular lines of perspective and no vanishing point; the architecture is not idealised and not proportionate; and the arcades are dark and sinister.

The painting has people (or at least a person), and you are scared for who is playing with the hoop, as the shadow of another person (or of a statue) is foreboding.

And the shadows generally don’t quite add up.

(Curiously, the sky is not that different.)

This is also a painting of its time: 1914, as Europe and elsewhere fell into the Great War.

For me this paining conveys a place (and polity) in its actuality: how it is – confusing and incoherent.

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I use both paintings regularly as banners and avatars and so on.

Taken together they seem to show the job of a commentator on law and policy: explaining things as they are, but with reference to how rules and principles insist those things should be.

But…

…it was not until recently I realised something about the two paintings.

And this realisation was triggered by re-reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

In that book some fifty-five cities are described in all their vivid variety.

But, as the narrator reveals midway in the book, they are all depictions of the very same city (Venice).

And so I realised that the Renaissance Master and Giorgio de Chirico were also not painting different cities…

…but painting the very same city, but with a different outlook.

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Thank you for following this blog as it transforms into The Empty City.