Troja in the Trecento. Narration with Images, within the Image, and between Word and Image

The subject of investigation are extensive pictorial cycles on Troy matter in Italian luxury manuscripts of the 14th century. This means editions of the Roman de Troie by Benot de Sainte-Maure and the Historia destructionis Troiae by Guido de Columnis, a Latin prose version of Benot`s French long poem. Still more than other epics from north-western Europe, the Troy matter was highly successful in Italy. Its appropriation, which following the model of the Aeneid often took the form of a local founding legend, led - among other things - to the production of new pictorial worlds on a basis that varied according to region. The aim of the investigation is to demonstrate the significance of these little exploited, extremely rich pictorial worlds for the differentiation of trecento painting and the development of text illustration. To this end, the manuscripts will be investigated and compared on the basis of their source material. This should involve argumentation from the perspective both of representational techniques and narrative forms: how were the representational techniques existing (and slowly broadening) around 1300 used to translate into images and sequences of images the events described so sophisticatedly in the texts and, as yet, not visualised? What is the regional profile, what is the novelty value of these creations? How are local traditions employed as part of a cultural appropriation of the text, where is the foreignness of the text converted into visual innovation? What consequences do the pictorial cycles have in book painting and in the monumental medium? The picture of trecento visual culture and pre-modern culture in Italy remains one-sided without due consideration of the still little researched illustrations relating to French epics. Precisely this has been shown by summary publications and exhibitions of recent years that dealt with Giotto`s afterlife and - bound to the great narratives of humanism and renaissance - blanked out this aspect. The illustrations on the Troy matter are at once a manageable and, in its rich contexts, a promising complex, which offers the chance to close the gap and correct the picture.

A romance in verse about the Troy matter was written in the twelfth century, but had its greatest success in fourteenth-century Italy. It was here that illustrated editions with hundreds of miniatures were produced. The codices helped the political elite to set the conflict between Guelphs and Ghibellines in world-historical context, and, in doing so, changed the art of visual narration. The readers of the text and viewers of the miniatures are invited to participate in mental games to bridge the differences between words and images; they are thus activated in a new manner. The single most important and beautiful of these manuscripts came via Prince Eugenes collection into the Austrian National Library.The results of the project are important for knowledge of Italian painting in the century between Giotto and Masaccio. To a greater extent than is known, this painting took the form of book illumination, was orientated towards narrative, and dealt with profane subject matter. Without knowledge of epic illustration, the way from Giotto to the art of the Renaissance remains incomprehensible. At the same time, it seems to have been precisely the Renaissance paradigm that long obstructed art-historical research in the investigation of these works: it is disconcerting to think that it was not Homers or Virgils texts that provided the basis for developing new narrational techniques, but rather the texts of high-medieval authors, who remodeled the classical narrations to fit the chivalrous patterns of thought of a north French public.