Painting Against Nature: A Medieval Queer Theory of Art and the Artist
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This essay argues that a group of fourteenth-century illuminators from Paris understood painting as an ‘unnatural’ or queer art form, adopting Narcissus as a reflexive emblem and a site of artistic self-fashioning. After excavating a medieval intellectual tradition that associated deceptive images with queerness, I demonstrate how medieval artists leveraged queerness as a strategy to articulate artistic freedom. Art-historical narratives have framed their miniatures as failures to reproduce texts accurately, and failures to reproduce the natural world stylistically. Queer methodologies offer a new framework in which to appreciate ‘unnaturalistic’ medieval artworks in the terms of the medieval queer theory that they espouse.
Source: Art History
Author: Christopher T Richards
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $3,185
OpenAlex ID: W4411762755