La «grande meditacion de la figure» dans “Les regnars traversans les perilleuses voyes des folles fiances du monde” de Jean Bouchet

Abstract

In Les regnars traversans les perilleuses voyes des folles fiances du monde (1501), Bouchet offers a meditative journey, punctuated with ten engravings from the edition of the Parisian bookseller Antoine Vérard, which recalls the monastic and rhetorical tradition of meditatio, based both on text and on the image. On each engraving, inscriptions made up of quotes taken from the prophetic books of the Bible accompany figurative scenes representing foxes. The narrator, subjected to a vision, tells how he meets them, while they engage in different activities, as he himself climbs a mountain. Some of the figures of foxes retained in the series of engravings of the edition of Vérard find their origin in the frontispiece engraving of the poem by Sebastian Brant, Von dem Fuchshatz, but they were then surmonted by popular proverbs there. In Vérard’s edition, the image comes under a double regime, since it shows both the dynamic scene with which the narrator is confronted during his vision and that it becomes, enhanced with biblical inscriptions, a «figure», a recurring term which becomes the beginning and the support of a meditation in action on the part of the narrator. The apparent darkness of the pictorial scene, the source of meditation, is resolved by the reflexive process generated by the biblical quotation. As in the monastic culture, the reading (of the text as of the image) of a typological nature first leads ultimately to an ethical reading.