‘contrefais al vif’: nature, ideas and the lion drawings of Villard de Honnecourt

Abstract

Early thirteenth-century Europe presents a distinctive setting for word and image problems. Not only were the terms of visuality itself changing, but the new influx of Aristotelian ideas provoked changes in the metaphysical import of words, as well. New formulations eventually arose from this unsettled situation. On the one hand, Roger Bacon, John Pecham and Witelo were to put the science of optics on a new footing.1 On the other, more subtle epistem. ological theories appeared,2 and the debate between universals and particulars became formalized.3 The incipient stage of these new formulations is marked by new relations between words and images. This was apparent even in such essentially conservative contexts as the Scriptures. In the early thirteenth-century Bibles moralisees, for example, the traditional relationship between words and images has, in many respects, been reversed: the written text is no longer predominant but has given way to a dramatic proliferation of images which, in the Old French version in Vienna, occupy the central columns, the written text forming a ‘gloss’ in the margins.4 The new currency accorded to images is also signalled in the legislation of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, which specified that the titulus of every altar should be clearly indicated either with a written inscription or, significantly, by means of an image.5 One of the factors that provoked this new relationship is the development of more empirical, and consequently less textually based, approaches to knowledge. Just such an empirically based instance of this word-image relationship, one that has not hitherto been addressed in these terms, is provided by another early thirteenth-century manuscript, the so-called ‘album’ or ‘sketchbook’ of Villard de Honnecourt. Among the heterogeneous contents of this manuscript are several drawings with ‘captions’ that purport to explain the drawings. Two instances of these captioned drawings, in particular, will be analysed here (see figures 1, 2), and conclusions will be drawn on the intellectual environment of productive change affecting their distinctive charactcristics and, in particular, on the claims arising from the discourse between words and Images.