This paper will address the possible motives underpinning the transformative quality of the portrayals of aquatic creatures, morphing of single creatures from one state to another, fish to sea monster, or from one thing to another, sea monster to dragon, considering the persistence of the motif from its pre-Christian, pagan manifestations into the art of the conversion period of the seventh century. This metamorphosis of fish into something more monstrous has led to the suggestion that perhaps some of the fantastical beasts and dragons found in early Anglo-Saxon art grew out of this type of image. The portrayal of these fish motifs can appear naturalistic, leading to attempts to identify the specific species of fish, but can also be abstracted, exaggerated, and evolving into creatures more akin to aquatic monsters than recognizable fish. A fish could be mounted facing outward towards a viewer or inwards, visible (or at least known) only to the bearer, suggesting that the image of a fish held a deeply symbolic and perhaps apotropaic role in early Anglo-Saxon ornamentation. If one considers miniatures in legal manuscripts as a network of images supporting lawyers’ memory, it appears that the lively narrative and expressive energy of l’Illustratore properly answered the need of something striking and unusual mnemonic images should show to be memorable according to the first-century-BC Rhetorica ad Herennium.įish are among the more prevalent zoomorphic creatures that proliferate in early Anglo-Saxon art, commonly appearing on armament and recognizable by common conventions of portrayal. This approach depends on the observations by Frances Yates (1969) and Jean-Philippe Antoine (1988) about the correspondence between the mental images used in religious meditation shaped as active images set in tridimensional places according to the rules of the classical and medieval artificial memory and the great change of Italian religious painting between the thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries.

My paper is intended to focus on one among the protagonists of this turning, working in the 1330s-1340s, the anonymous illuminator nicknamed l’Illustratore by Longhi himself, and suggest a new interpretation of his disruption of giottesque balance on the basis of the didactic function as mnemonic images that miniatures performed in the law manuscripts produced for Bologna University, the main European center for this kind of objects.

Art historians have widely studied the direct expressive force of Bolognese Trecento and the role of Byzantinising and northern-european gothic influences. Since Roberto Longhi (1934-1935, 1950) modern scholarship has got a critical grasp of the original change Bolognese painting and illumination showed as a result of the epochal turn of the new realism by Giotto in the first half of fourteenth century.

Ensoulment by Nick Askew