82A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICONarchaeologist and historian John R. Allen, “a tiger is described as a kind
of serpent, and is actually drawn as a dragon with wings.”^32 Naturalism
had lost prominence in artistic production throughout central and east-
ern Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.^33 As an epistemic modal-
ity, naturalistic realism in representation became inadequate to the pro-
vision of the rendition of a world constructed through the “already coded
eye” of Christianity.
As will be seen in the next two chapters, the reemergence of naturalis-
tic realism as an epistemic tool in natural history coincided with the pos-
itivistic approaches of the Enlightenment and played a fundamental
ideological role in the processes of animal objectification. From an art
historical perspective, the departure from naturalistic realism that char-
acterized the postclassical phase has been generally acknowledged as
the result of the influence of so-called barbaric art, or Celtic, Germanic,
Hiberno-Saxon, and Viking art.^34 Simultaneously, throughout central
Europe, medieval painting was produced by discourses and practices that
prioritized representation as an ordering agent in a highly dystopian
world. Painting became the site of God’s materialization; a limited, fil-
tered, flattened, and miniaturized world better lent itself to be controlled
and assimilated into discourses by becoming more and more graspable.
Medieval painting and manuscript illuminations thus engaged in circu-
larities between discourses and representation in which one reciprocally
validated the other—God’s word was truth and the representation of God
became the word.
However, within the flatness of medieval painting two major epistemic
achievements took place. First of all, flatness operated as the marker of
the spiritual. Flatness suggested a lifting from the metaphysical—figures
were deliberately extrapolated from the spatial as well as temporal flux of
the world.^35 Once flattened, they existed exclusively in symbolic registers.
Second, by extrapolating figures from the three-dimensionality of the
world, medieval art enhanced the possibilities of organizing the world ac-
cording to the omnipotence of God. Bypassing realism enabled artists to
construct hierarchical structures in which figures were arranged in size
according to their theological importance, not in relation to the position-
ing of the viewer’s gaze. Thus, images and words ontologically coincided
in the material condition they shared: the flatness of manuscript pages
or t he wooden boa rds of pa i nt i ngs. Repeated a nd d issem i nated t h roug h