Richard de Fournival, in the mid-thirteenth century, created the highly original Bestiaires d’amours by appropriating the bestiary genre, historically a vehicle for Christian allegory, to the domain of love. Yet at least one lyric poet anticipated him by about a century in this appropriation: the troubadour Rigaut de Berbezilh, unique among early troubadours for his lavish use of extended similes that call to mind not only a few songbirds but the entire animal kingdom, the moon and stars, the rivers and the sun. The very concept of the illustrated discourse—pictures for the eye, with accompanying text for the ear—takes advantage of an interconnection of the senses that Richard de Fournival patiently explains to his addressee. The illuminated book as exemplified by Physiologus-derived bestiaries was steadily gaining popularity in the twelfth century—at first with pen drawings that still retained Carolingian features, and later in the century, with miniature paintings more properly called illuminations. Visual allegorical imagery, as a powerful mnemonic device, found currency in similarly illustrated sermons; still another equivalent to the picture-book was the church itself, a “memory house” filled with external images ready to be converted to mental images that taught Christian lessons. - [Author]

Language: English