Earliest wild-man sculptures in France

Abstract

Depictions of the wild man in manuscript illuminations date back to A.D. 1000 or even earlier, but the oldest known sculputure is from the mid-thirteenth-century Notre-Dame de Semur-en-Auxois (Côte d'Or). An analysis of this wild man in the context of two adjacent figures and the sculpted tympanum behind them identifies him as the Old Testament character, Esau, and suggests that the wild-man sculpture played a mediating role between the non-literate people and the Church. A similar examination of earlier popular sculptures in the context of the official clerical iconography surrounding them, reveals two possible pre-thirteenth-century wild-man depictions. The first is in twelfth-century Saint-Hilaire de Foussais (Vendée), where the wild man is presented as one of the elements of God's creation which includes the hybrids and monsters of contemporary encyclopedias, Marvels of the East and bestiaries; but this wild man is also in the vicinity of the repented sinners Nebuchadnezzar and Mary Magdalene, who were both, in subsequent periods, depicted as hairy wild man and wild woman. The second is in eleventh-century Notre-Dame de Thuret (Puy-de-Dôme), where the wild man is a half-simian and tailless creature, representing the potential sinner existing within each person. His prominent location inside the church suggests that his function was to act as a didactic warning to the faithful. In each of these cases, the wild man of popular mythology was adopted by the Church to communicate with the non-literate people. As opposed to manuscript illuminations which were restricted to the literate minority, the wild-man sculptures formed part of the dialogue between popular and official cultures.