Body-Worlds ― Opicinus de Canistris and the Medieval Cartographic Imagination

In 1334, an Italian priest named Opicinus de Canistris fell ill and had a divine vision of continents and oceans transformed into human figures which inspired numerous drawings. While they relate closely to contemporary maps and seacharts, religious iconography, medical illustration, and cosmological diagrams, Opicinus's drawings cannot be assimilated to any of these categories. In their beautiful strangeness they complicate many of our assumptions about medieval visual culture, and spark lines of inquiry into the interplay of religion and science, the practice of experimentation, the operations of allegory in the fourteenth century, and ultimately into the status of representation itself.

Karl Whittington is an assistant professor in the Department of History of Art at The Ohio State University. His research and teaching interests include medieval theories of vision and the image, the pictorial mechanics of Trecento painting, medieval medical and scientific imagery, and representations of the body in the Middle Ages. The author of articles on the "psalter map," on the "cruciform womb," and on Casper David Friedrich, he has contributed catalogue essays for various exhibitions and to Material Collective, an online forum devoted to visual and material culture. The recipient of a Meiss/Mellon Author's Book Award from the College Art Association and an ICMA-Samuel H. Kress Research Award from the International Center of Medieval Art, he has lectured widely and was a visiting fellow at Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz in 2009.