This beautifully illustrated catalogue accompanied an exhibition held at the J. Paul Getty Museum, returning to a theme from their 2006 exhibition Landscape in the Renaissance. It explores the representation of the natural world in manuscript illumination from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The small exhibition, comprised of around thirty-five manuscripts, drawings, and paintings from the museum's collections, is greatly augmented by the catalogue, which includes a number of works that were not on view and additional pages from the various manuscripts. The catalogue is divided into three sections: “Elements and Symbols of the Natural World,” “Gardens and the Cultivated Earth,” and “Wilderness and the Land beyond the City,” preceded by an extensive introduction. Each chapter concludes with a brief aside focusing on a single manuscript, along with several images contained therein.
The introduction provides a good general overview of the attitudes toward nature expressed by Renaissance artists and intellectuals and traces the changes in the depiction of the natural world in manuscripts from the fourteenth into the fifteenth century. Much of the information presented is a synopsis of earlier contributions to the field, ranging from Erwin Panofsky's Early Netherlandish Painting, Its Origins and Character to Jacob Wamberg's recent Landscape as World Picture: Tracing Cultural Evolution in Images. Beginning with late Gothic images of elements from nature in marginalia, the authors shift to the early fifteenth century in France with the Limbourg brothers’ masterpiece the Très Riches Heures and its images of seasonal occupations set within the countryside around Paris. They then turn to Italy and manuscripts illuminated by artists such as Lorenzo Monaco and Pisanello. Although not illustrated in the catalogue, early natural-history treatises with images are discussed, and the naturalistic representations of plants, animals, and insects are linked to the carefully rendered flora and fauna of religious manuscripts. Before turning to the Netherlands and Germany, the authors touch briefly on the influence of the grotteschi of the Domus Aurea, discovered in the late fifteenth century, and of Leonardo da Vinci on manuscript illumination. The introduction ends in the Netherlands, where the predecessors to the independent genre of landscape were developed; here, the focus is on the works of the Van Eyck brothers and Hans Memling in comparison to the manuscript paintings by Simon Bening and other artists.
The subsequent chapters consider the symbolism of the natural world, the portrayal of gardens, and images of the wilderness (which is defined simply as outside of civilization), “examining the connection between text and image in devotional manuscripts” for each section (46). The first chapter addresses calendar pages and books of hours, where specificity of time and location relate to the meaning and subject of the scenes, and flower symbolism. In the second, the authors review the allegorical connotations of gardens. This includes both the importance of cultivation and control as well as the idea of the enclosed and protected space that is associated with the Virgin Mary. Gardens are “free to bloom, protected from harm, and seemingly unadulterated by the wild and untamed world beyond,” embodying fertility, chastity, and virginity at once (70). Images of identifiable plants and flowers are related to the rising interest in botanical studies at the end of the fifteenth century, and the extended discussion at the end of the chapter analyzes the floral symbolism in a single manuscript, the Flemish Crohin-La Fontaine Hours of ca. 1480–85. The final section, on wilderness, explores nature as part of religious experience through images of hermit saints in manuscripts. Untouched nature was viewed as a place to overcome desire and truly connect with God. The term wilderness is, however, not clearly explained by the authors.
The catalogue serves as an excellent introduction to the representation of the natural world in Renaissance manuscripts, addressed to the general public. It presents a concise analysis of a number of images from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, making connections to developments in painting and natural history, although the relationship could have been explored in more depth. The book would benefit from additional footnotes and a longer bibliography, but it stands alone from the exhibition and introduces the reader to the widespread significance of images of nature within Renaissance manuscripts by focusing on works from a single collection.
