It goes without saying that “naturalism” has played an absolutely central role in art-historical discourse. This is true in two broad senses. On one hand, there is artistic practice: artists have, in various ways, relied on the observation of the visible world in the creation of images. On the other, there is the standard art-historical narrative, articulated by scholars from Pliny through Vasari to the present, which posits a diagnostic role to the perception of naturalism, gauging the degree of an image’s naturalism to discern intention and meaning, and assigns particular works to one or another art-historical epoch. Jean Givens’s new book contains a fascinating meditation on these issues. It is a significant contribution, engaging in a serious and thoughtful manner with the writings of ancient authors, more recent art-historical “classics” (such as Ernst Gombrich’s work), and current scholarship (like that of Claudia Swan and Peter Parshall). Her conclusions are worthy of the attention of all medievalists, and, more generally, of anyone concerned with the referential properties of images.

Givens describes her book as rooted in three basic questions. The first and most basic of these concerns medieval artistic practice: did medieval artists rely on their observation of nature when creating images? This question prompts a second, methodological query: how can we tell whether or not they did? Her third question is essentially historiographic: why have scholars been so preoccupied with questions of whether or not an image was based on direct observation? She notes that this last question initially appears relatively easy to answer; after all, the necessity of imitating nature has a distinguished pedigree in the literature on the visual arts. Over the course of the book, her attention here shifts, however, as her recognition that many earlier studies employed an oversimplified notion of “naturalism” prompts her to construct a more nuanced terminology. This in turn allows her to rethink the significance of observation in image-making, producing an account that is more subtle and more convincing than the sweeping claims posited by earlier generations of scholars.

The images at the center of Givens’s study depict what would commonly be described as “real” objects (e.g., the recognizable plant species adorning some Gothic capitals). She specifically eschews another oft-cited and much debated instance of late medieval “naturalism,” portraiture, writing that this category of images constitutes “a dead end here for our purposes” (35–36). This seems debatable; in fact, many of the problems she cites with previous studies of herbal imagery and foliate capitals have also haunted the scholarship on portraiture, and the approaches she employs in her study could usefully be applied to an analysis of images of individuals. However, to say this hardly counts as criticism. Adding a consideration of portraits to her study would undoubtedly have lengthened it, but would not necessarily have altered her fundamental conclusions concerning the works on which she focuses.

The book begins with a consideration of one of the classic instances of late medieval “naturalism”: the minutely detailed, species-specific representations of leaves that adorn capitals and other architectural elements in the chapter house at Southwell. Carved in the last decade of the thirteenth century, they have attracted considerable scholarly attention, most notably in a 1946 monograph by Nikolaus Pevsner. Scholars have cited these works along with others of the period as marking a watershed moment in the history of art, the first indications that artists were turning toward a more experiential engagement with the world. Most memorably, Erwin Panofsky presented this perceived development as symptomatic of a new mentality, one that would vanquish a purportedly “medieval” attitude favoring a hidebound adherence to tradition, and replace it with an empirical mindset supposedly characteristic of modern scientific thought. Recent scholarship has, of course, rendered such teleological accounts obsolete. Givens’s book joins with several other recent studies (e.g., essays and books by Michael Camille, Paul Binski, and Jeffrey Hamburger¹) in contemplating the implications of this new, more complex understanding of various forms of medieval “visuality.” While others have unpacked the motivations and biases that informed earlier scholarship on “the rise of naturalism,” Givens leaves such considerations aside; her goal is to rethink the nature of naturalism in the Gothic era, as it were, rather than to provide an ideological critique of earlier accounts that she shows to be untenable.

As Givens admirably demonstrates, those earlier accounts are founded on a poorly conceived—indeed, hopelessly vague—use of the term “naturalism.” Scholars have used that term to describe, and thus unite, what are, in fact, a vastly disparate array of images and practices. Working through what we might refer to as different representational modes, Givens proposes a set of far more precise terms that we might employ; one of these in particular, “descriptiveness,” serves her quite well later in the book. Her attention to the subtleties of language and her terminological intentionality here are exemplary.

Givens’s second chapter addresses a matter that was central to late medieval sign theory (and, indeed, that continues to preoccupy the present): the fundamental insufficiency of language to convey our experience of the world. She tracks ways in which several thirteenth-century individuals deployed images as a means of supplementing and clarifying otherwise opaque texts, and she demonstrates that by doing so these individuals effectively made a case for the semiotic potency of images as signifiers of knowledge concerning the material world. One of the strengths of Givens’s study is her willingness to exploit a range of visual material, including images that easily fit within modern notions of “art” as well as those that would not ordinarily be addressed in aesthetic terms. For instance, she demonstrates that thirteenth-century cartography and heraldic illustrations share the propensity of both Villard de Honnecourt and Matthew Paris to employ visual material as a means of compensating for the inadequacy or inefficiency of verbal description in conveying information. Givens focuses in particular on Villard’s well-known images of lions, which Villard asserts to have been “counterfeited al vif,” and Matthew’s images of an elephant, which he claimed were modeled on a living specimen. Several earlier treatments of those images have celebrated them as symptomatic of a nascent interest in naturalism per se—in other words, as proof of the validity of a teleological art-historical narrative that takes the replication of the natural world as its ultimate goal. Givens’s incisive study serves as a helpful corrective to such anachronistic accounts.

The third chapter deepens that analysis, considering several methods by which medieval images conveyed information about the visible world. This chapter focuses in particular on late medieval herbal manuscripts, famously studied some years ago by Otto Pächt, but it also addresses other examples of represented foliage, both sculptural (e.g., in the capitals at Reims) and painted (e.g., in the margins of late medieval Horae). Givens demonstrates that previous scholars’ description of such images as “naturalistic” vastly oversimplifies matters. She chooses instead to distinguish between “realism” (a term she uses to encompass any image that refers to an actual object), “naturalism” (a term she reserves “for images that register the overall irregularity and variety inherent in living creatures"), and “descriptive” images (by which she means images that “visually communicate information concerning the external and, sometimes, internal structure of real-world objects and phenomena” (102)). While all of these representational modes may be subsumed under the traditional term “naturalism,” they differ in key ways. For instance, a “naturalistic” image need not be based on direct observation of an actual specimen. Likewise, the creator of a “descriptive” image might find that attention to the particularity of an actual specimen impedes the image’s ability to convey information, and that reliance on conventions can provide a more stable means of visual communication.

Givens turns in chapter 4 to a related and perhaps even more important question: why did certain forms of naturalism become so prevalent in the thirteenth century? Having effectively demolished the earlier teleological account that understood the “rise of naturalism” as part of an inevitable march toward modern empiricism allows Givens to construct an explanation that is far more attuned to the specific historical contexts in which particular instances of these images arose. Due to the paucity of contextual information that survives, she wisely uses a fairly broad brush to suggest motivating factors here. In the case of the identifiable species of plants found in Gothic capitals, for example, Givens notes that they may have conveyed symbolic content (e.g., the evocation of Eucharistic themes through the representation of grape vines) and that they may have also prompted viewers to engage in metaphorical readings of the architectural space (e.g., vines could express the equation of the chapter house and cloister area with gardens, and thus Paradise). But in particular, she focuses on the species at Southwell as reflections of the economic interests of the canons, noting that while seated in the chapter house they would have found themselves surrounded by carved references to the trees growing on the privately held lands that were a major source of their wealth and power.

The fifth chapter turns to images that are based on what we could describe simply as another form of observation: the reliance on artistic models. Here Givens unpacks, to the extent that it is possible, the sources used by the late medieval creators of the images she has been considering. She demonstrates that any attempt to analyze medieval images according to a simple binary model—as being based either on models or on the observation of nature—is hopelessly naive. In fact, the images she considers were always based on both the natural world and on artistic tradition. This, of course, is not surprising in itself—after all, Gombrich’s notion of “schema and correction” always assumed that all representations of the visible world are an amalgam of convention and observation. But many earlier scholarly accounts privilege the “observation” side of that equation, and chart a progress toward ever-increasing reliance on nature. Givens, by contrast, shows that late medieval artists were far freer in their use of sources, turning to both artistic models and direct observation without prejudice, according to their particular needs at the moment.

In sum, this book is a terrific study of representation in the late Middle Ages, and a marvelous addition to recent scholarship on the social, cognitive, and epistemological forces that informed late medieval artistic styles. The only regrets I have about this publication have to do with its treatment by the publisher. The book contains only sixty-three black-and-white figures and eight color plates. In several instances, further illustrations would have helped clarify the argument—indeed, such stinginess seems a shame for a book that takes as one of its central themes the late medieval awareness of the informational capacity of images! While the quantity of images is modest, the price tag for the book is not, with a list price of $85. However, while these (relatively minor) problems undoubtedly reflect the troubled state of publishing in medieval art history, they do not in any way tarnish the achievements of the author, who has produced here a marvelous work of admirable learning and judicious scholarship.