Luxuriously detailed depictions of the living surfaces of flowering meadows abound in tapestries, manuscript illuminations, wall paintings, and panel paintings produced for fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Valois aristocrats. Because these artworks often contain figural imagery, lack perspectival recession, and appear in media other than oil on panel, they have been repeatedly characterized as “early” and “undeveloped” antecedents to the modern landscape painting. My dissertation contends that these artworks constitute an autonomous medieval tradition of picturing the land with its own history and cultural underpinnings. I argue that when these artworks are taken seriously on their own terms, they reveal their elite patrons’ intellectual, cultural, and sensorial interest in the meadows that dominated the surface of the land in late medieval northern Europe. My research takes an interdisciplinary approach, studying descriptions of meadows in late medieval artworks and texts in conjunction with historical evidence for cultural practices of engaging with these landscapes in Valois courts. This investigation contributes to interdisciplinary discourses within the environmental humanities by expanding our understanding of the broader history of human conceptions of, and relationships with, their world.
Isabella Mimi Weiss (Thu,) studied this question.