Abstract
This essay draws on Ian Bogost’s invention of ‘Latour litanies’ to argue that Villard’s sketchbook gives us a compendium of vibrant and unpredictable objects, which is particularly true concerning his drawings of lions. Responding to debates over whether these sketches were actually drawn from life – ‘contrefais al vif’ – as Villard claims, I chart an alternate path by arguing that Villard’s lions represent a moment of encounter with a dangerous object, a strange, ultimately unknowable, predatory other.
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Notes
See Polan, ‘Things I Saw – No. 3’ (2012).
See also Bogost, ‘Latour Litanizer’ (2009), which ‘uses Wikipedia’s random page API to generate lists of things for visitors to the site.’ Here’s mine: Serge Poliakoff, Robert Pikler, Gurgen Boryan, Wayne Shorter Discography, Olga Barysheva, Metsküla, Lääne County, Marvel Action Universe, Anglican prayer beads, (11587) 1994 UH2.
Villard’s sketchbook is available online through the Bibliothèque nationale’s picture collection: http://images.bnf.fr/jsp/index.jsp.
All citations of Villard’s Sketchbook, unless otherwise noted, are from Bowie’s (1959) edition, cited parenthetically by page number.
Folio 4, which depicts a large bear and swan, is an exception to this rule.
Villard rarely provides ground lines. Consequently, the viewer is often unable to definitively establish relationality between objects, which further emphasizes the Latourian quality of Villard’s pages.
For a similar reading of Derrida, see Steel (2013).
References
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to the Camille Essay Prize judges; my generous and careful readers, Karl Steel, Rob Wakeman, and Judy Harwell; Holly Dugan, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, and Eileen Joy for help along the way; and especially Ben Tilghman for encouraging me to write about Villard in the first place.
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Swenson, H. Lions and Latour litanies in The Sketchbook of Villard de Honnecourt. Postmedieval 4, 257–269 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.21
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2013.21