Painting Against Nature: A Medieval Queer Theory of Art and the Artist

Abstract This essay argues that a group of fourteenth-century illuminators from Paris understood painting as an ‘unnatural’ or queer art form, adopting Narcissus as a reflexive emblem and a site of artistic self-fashioning. After excavating a medieval intellectual tradition that associated deceptive images with queerness, I demonstrate how medieval artists leveraged queerness as a strategy to articulate artistic freedom. Art-historical narratives have framed their miniatures as failures to reproduce texts accurately, and failures to reproduce the natural world stylistically. Queer methodologies offer a new framework in which to appreciate ‘unnaturalistic’ medieval artworks in the terms of the medieval queer theory that they espouse.