Resumen de Living matter: materiality, maker, and ornament in the Middle Ages
This essay examines issues relating to materials and materiality and their signification in medieval art. Art historians have long dealt with these concerns and their symbolic function by juxtaposing texts, primarily from the scriptures, with material objects, but here I consider the medieval understanding of primordial matter as defined by Plato’s creation account in the Timaeus. The essay argues that in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the term silva used in Calcidius’s fourth-century Latin translation of the Timaeus led to a linking of primordial matter with woods, forests, and, by extension, foliate decoration and ideas of organic growth and change. By focusing on the artistic discourse regarding the representation of primary matter, the primordial material from which the world was generated, it shows how medieval artists engaged with the polysemy of philosophical terms relating to questions of genesis and creation, human as well as divine. The multiplicity of meanings of some of the signifying terms for primordial matter resulted in the construction of new visual depictions that ushered in novel approaches to the signification of materials in medieval art.
