In examining the lines of the piece, he traces the movement from the snail (bottom right), the hand of the Archangel Gabriel (center) and God the Father (in the sky beneath the left arch). Erickson – one needs to consider the placement of the snail as the artist may have. In this particular case, Daniel Arasse looks at Francesco del Cossa’s Annunciation, a painting from the early renaissance, pictured below.Īrasse suggests that rather than look to the snail as symbolic of the Blessed Virgin – as was suggested in an earlier Warburg Journal thesis by Megan L. One interesting take on the subject considers that the snail, as presented in medieval art, is meant to represent God. Others have implied the snail is a racy symbol of female sexuality. Other scholars have suggested that the snail may represent the struggle between the rich and poor, the powerful and the oppressed. Nor does it address why the image became so popular in non-historical texts such as Psalters and Books of Hours. Lilian Randall suggested that the snail was a symbol for the Lombards, a group vilified for their non-chivalrous behavior and treason, which would account for the snail’s antagonism of knights in armor, but does not explain why the sir is often on the losing side of the battle. Comte de Bastard believed the snail represented the Resurrection, having found it in two manuscripts close to miniatures of the Raising of Lazarus. There has been a good deal of debate over the significance of these images of gastropod violence, but no one has a definitive answer for what they mean or why they’re so prevalent in medieval manuscripts. When looking at the manuscript from which the above image is taken, a post-medieval colleague at the British Library thought it odd – and his medievalist fellows thought it odd he’d mention the picture at all. From Britain to the Netherlands, the Advent through to France, there are examples of these battles, so much so that many art historians consider them old hat. Throughout a number of medieval manuscripts, beginning in the Thirteenth Century through the Fourteenth, there are dozens of examples of marginalia sporting the same motif: gallant knights in full regalia engaged in combat with enormous snails. Trying to understand what people did, how they did it, and perhaps most importantly why they did it, is often as imaginative an endeavor as it is a scientific one.Īnd in the realm of strange secrets and curious customs, I would like to present this: It’s these perpetual puzzles and seductive secrets that make the study of history such an interesting endeavor. But we will never know for certain.Īnd that’s rather exciting. Experts love to theorize on things they can’t really prove. And we will probably never know for sure who the Man in the Iron Mask really was. We will very likely never know what ancient Sumerian sounded like. We will never discover the body of the historical Jesus Christ – and if we do, we would not be able to recognize it as such. We will always discover bits and pieces that don’t fit the narratives we’ve crafted to describe the lives of those who came before us, and there are some pieces of the historical that have simply been lost forever. One of the coolest things about the study of history is that there is no possible way for us to know everything. It has been edited slightly to remove some infamatory in-jokes about the academic validity of methods used by certain Art History documentary presenters. It’s not exactly the height of academia (I’m going to art school, yo), but I thought some people might find it interesting as an overview of the material. It’s about snails fighting knights and how weird that is, and how we basically have no idea why people drew them in the margins of their super-important-crazy-expensive manuscripts. This is the final paper I wrote for my Art History 107 class.
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