Ibi quasi allegorice – ibi tamen ad litteram: Imagined animals on Nature’s dress in Alan of Lille’s ›De Planctu Naturae‹

Abstract

Art historians have stressed the function of clothing as ‘accessory in the move’ (“bewegtes Beiwerk”, Aby Warburg), and have even pointed to its autonomous status in sculpture und painting (Georges Didi-Huberman). In this talk, I will show that this kind of autonomy tends to be already at work in the descrip-tion of the personified Nature by Alan of Lille, a Latin author attributed to the so called ‘School of Chartres’ of the 12th century’. In the readers’ perception, the numerous animals depicted on Nature’s dress appear as ‘moving images’, referring to contemporaneous concepts of imagination. Sometimes, the rather short accounts recall spiritual allegories of the Physiologus tradition, sometimes they adhere to the literal sense, revealing the potential of 12th century literature to perform secular knowledge. However, the extensive description is also relevant in the context of integumentum (the poetic clothing of a topic by figurative means), intensively discussed by Alan of Lille and his coevals.