Abstract

CONSIGLIERI, Nadia Mariana. The greens of woods. Visual strategies and ways of thinking of the forest as a discursive space in Late Medieval images. Scripta Mediaevalia [online]. 2022, vol.15, n.2, pp.185-214.  Epub Mar 14, 2023. ISSN 1851-8753.  http://dx.doi.org/10.48162/rev.35.021.

The wood represented a significant part of nature in medieval everyday life and imaginary. Apart from providing diverse resources, both its physical characteristics and the fauna and flora that either inhabited it or were thought to inhabit it were factors that contributed to linking it to the unknown, the hazardous and the wild. Its immeasurable dimensions as well as its polymorphic and whimsical nature enabled it to be thought of as a territory of the unforeseen and the random, where the threat of the occult and the unfamiliar was always latent. Various medieval bi-dimensional representations account for this idea. Certain spatial arrangements such as the concentration of elements in the plane and, especially dark greenish blue shades were frequently used to illustrate the forest. Would it be possible to talk about particular strategies to represent the forest through visual language? This paper aims to address the specificity of these discursive tactics of representing the wood and its surroundings through images produced between the 14th and 15th centuries.

Keywords : wood; natural discursive spaces; green; visions of nature; Middle Ages.

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