Représenter le nature : l’exemple des manuscrits

Abstract

Representing Nature in manuscripts Representing Nature is hardly ever the way it really is, but the way one imagines it. Painters and mosaicists of Late Antiquity have thus brought to life creatures that naturalists of course described, but that no one had ever seen, like unicorn, phoenix or griffin. They placed them in perfectly realistic scenes, like hunts, so that their picture made it possible to push back the boundaries of the World. In general, and despite some remarkable exceptions, at that time the scientific sensitivity to nature is decreasing, and if it is still present in some writers, it seems even weaker in the figurative arts: there are no representation, for example, of winter or desert, which are yet well described in literary texts. We examine here some significant examples borrowed from manuscripts which highlight the poor quality of the representations of Nature in the late illustrated works of Virgil, or which on the contrary introduce to a few artists with a more acute sensitivity. The representations of the Flood perfectly reflect these differences in temperament. [Author]