Les genres artistiques “profanes” au XIII^e siècle: Convention et originalité dans le plafond à caissons de la cathédrale de Téruel et les marges du Vidal Mayor

Through the study of two Spanish works of the thirteenth century (the wooden ceiling of the Aragonese church of Santa María de Mediavilla, and the margins of the Vidal Mayor, a well-known legal manuscript preserved in the Getty Museum of Malibu), this study addresses a general question that has sparked numerous debates in recent times: the presence and meaning of ludic and profane imagery in sacred or other serious contexts. This issue is addressed from the perspective of what may be called—following Gombrich—the “primacy of artistic genres” in the modus operandi of artistic creation and reception in the Middle Ages, a principle which seems unavoidable when we want to establish the intended meaning of an image, or—as the article proposes—to distinguish between its generic (or topical) sense and its specific (or original) significance or significances.