Parisian Book Illustration, 1530 - 1560: The Decades of Liberation

The period of the 1530s to the 1560s in Paris saw a major functional and stylistic redefinition in which illustration was liberated from its customary subservience to text and granted a privileged role. I propose to analyze a number of representational models that emerged in the most foreshortened manner onto the Parisian scene during that era. I will argue that the shift from a representational model reflecting a single schema to multiple models either coexisting with or succeeding one another was the cause for the temporary liberation of illustration in Paris during these decades. For a short while, illustration was relieved from its traditional function of articulating the world of experience according to a homogeneous vision of the world. Instead, as it exposed simultaneously, during this period of transition, manifold and occasionally antithetic schemas, illustration became for a privileged moment a heuristic tool, a means for exploring and probing reality.