Pictures of Nature. Mineral Imagery in Modern French Aesthetics

Abstract

Thus, from antiquity to the twentieth century, figured stones have changed so many times their ontological status. They were considered collectibles, emblems of prodigiousness or of curiosity; they have been interpreted as works of art attributed to nature or to a supreme creator, in competition with the works of the artists; they were finally gazed at as case or guardians of a secret revealed in the underground and overt (at the meantime) „stone writing”. This study is devoted to the forms of mineral imagery. It is interested in enlightening the contacts between visual arts and arts of speech, between sensitive image and immaterial images, and the difficult journeys, and the indispensable complementarities between the language of images and that of writing. In particular, this occurs through the analysis of natural ékphrasis, that is, through the literary descriptions of the stone pictures, rediscovered by a renewed collecting interest in minerals and a revitalization of the aesthetic reflection on the conditions of the natural beauty.