Aline Hornaday wrote:
>The Song of Roland describes the Pyreneean scenery around Roncesvalles -
>just as it still is today - with great poetical power. Many more examples
>could be cited from medieval poetry.
Powerful enough for it to stick in my creaky mind for 30 years, Aline.
But...
Hauts sont les monts, les vallees tenebreuses,
Les roches bises, les gorges prodigieuses. (814-5)
Hauts sont les montes et tenebreux et grands, AOI.
Les vaux profonds et les ruisseaux courants. (1830-1)
Hauts sont les monts et tres hauts sont les arbres. (22771)
[sic?: trees higher than mountains?]
Powerful is it, but rather thin gruel for extrapolating a natural
world view.
Except that the very starkness and economy may be the key.
Landscapes and trees in contemporary (late 11th-early 12th c.)
"Romanesque" ms. illuminations and mural painting are analgously
"dessicated," "simple" (deceptively so), and, yes, powerful.
On the other hand, from its inception, the stylistic sequence in the
figurative arts which we call (thanks to Sir Christopher Wren, who
applied the term to architecture) "Gothic" was/is marked by its
conception of the world as being infinitely divisible.
The attention to detail--whether in the depiction of "natrual" or
"man-made" objects--is there from the 12th c.(if not before) and
grows, crescendo-like, until it peaks out with the masters of the
Northern "Renaissance" in the 15th and 16th cc.
The Philosophy chair at Claire Sahlin's university needs to get off
his duff and take a look at a good Van Eyk, with his marvelous
landscapes rendered in infinite detail.
Or at Gerard David's painting of the flaying of a saint (I forget which,
there are so many), in which we have a soldier wearing a helmet on
which is reflected the scene around him, including one of his fellow
soldiers, wearing a helmet on which is a scene reflected in which....
This idea of the *infinite divisibility* of the material world lies at
the heart of the "medieval world view", to the extent we can talk
of such a construct (cf. E. Panofsky's _Gothic Architecture and
Scholasticism_).
A bargin at $00.02. (This post and $4.00 will get you a cup of
coffee at any Starbucks).
Best from here to everyone on this good list,
Christopher
Christopher Crockett
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Christopher's Book Room
P.O. Box 1061
Bloomington, IN 44702
Future owner of: Centre des Etudes Chartraines,
a home on the Web for Chartres-related scholarship
from all disciplines, comming soon to a web site near you.
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