Censura y libertad intelectual en la cultura visual del siglo XIII

Abstract

Intellectual censorship in the thirteenth century marked a milestone in contemporary academic and religious domains, not just testified by all the letters, synods and prohibitions on aristotelic metaphysics and natural philosophy, but also by the coetaneous visual culture. By taking as subject of research some images that convey the convulsive intellectual panorama at the University of Paris, instead of making an inventory of the visual formulas that testify the thirteenth century parisian censorship, I have chosen three case studies that, with very different perspectives, converge in their visual reference to the challenges implied by the aristotelic natural philosophy. The study of the depiction of secular disciplines in the Moralized Bibles has been undertaken by K. Tachau in her essential article "God's Compass and Vana Curiositas", where this kind of depictions are studied in light of the contemporary intellectual environment. In this dissertation I wanted to bring up the research of these images in the context of the medieval exegetic tradition of Wisdom, in order to emphasise the subtlety of the Moralized bibles makers' position about the dangers of the study of philosophy, dialectics and astrology. The iconographers of these manuscripts adopted a conservative position by highlighting the inability of the secular disciplines to reach divine wisdom by means of the same structures of thought used for the comprehension of the earthly world. Following the same methodological approach, in the second part of this dissertation, the character of the foolish is considered regarding the insipiens from Psalm 52. This iconographical motif, that became popular during the thirteenth-century increasing illumination of the Psalms, was originated when the initial of Psalm 52 started to be illustrated with the image of a shabby man that, with a club and a blank disk in each hand, denies God. In the two first Bibles moralisées, this incipient iconography of the fool is also adapted to the depiction of some university masters, showing the foolishness of those who challenge the divine order by practising the wordly disciplines. Finally, in the last chapter of this dissertation, I consider the compass as a sort of "dynamic sign" that links macrocosm with microcosm. On the one hand, the compass was the tool used by Divine Reason in the very moment of transferring the divine plan to the wordly field during Creation; on the other, the compass was also the attribute of human reason, which was necessary for correct judgement between good and evil. Just like human knowledge was acceptable for the study of the earthly world, but fruitless for the celestial one, human reason in the Moralized bibles was useful for the right fulfilment of moral rules, but it didn't enable the comprehension of the plan set by God "in principio", not only related to visible things, but also to the economy of salvation. By depicting John the Baptist's parents, Zacharias and Elizabeth, with a compass and a set square or triangle, this instrument becomes a visual element that activates the relationship between the beginning of the plan of salvation during Creation, and the second milestone of the curse of Salvation: the fulfilment of the plan through the Incarnation the Son of God. In short, the compass becomes in a dynamic sign, marking the Economy of Salvation milestones, but also driving human reason through the right path to Salvation.