Experimenting with Opicinus de Canistris (1296–ca. 1354)

Abstract

The maps, drawings, and diagrams made by the fourteenth-century Italian priest and artist Opicinus de Canistris defy art historical categorization and challenge many modern notions of what and how medieval artists could represent. The drawings show embodied allegorical maps of the Mediterranean world, in which countries and continents are given human identities and relationships. This essay argues against the marginalization of Opicinus as a “psychotic” artist, looking instead at his work as a response to a visionary experience and demonstrating the close dialogue between his drawings and broader trends in fourteenth-century visual culture, including debates on empiricism, allegory, and optical science. Through a close reading of three examples, the essay demonstrates the importance of looking at the drawings’ most basic structures, forms, and arrangements to explain what the superimposition of maps and bodies, the empirical and the imaginary, allowed Opicinus to express about the world and the self.

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