Martine Clouzot

The illustrations of illuminated manuscripts between 1300 and 1450 featured a very large number of animal musicians. They were set in the marginal borders of the pages, and framed the text and miniature with their musical sonorities. Along with King David, animals were the main musicians featured in medieval

At the crossroads of history and art history, musicology and literature, their representations suggest that we identify typologies of books, animals and instruments. They raise several questions on three levels:

1/ the visual level of the instruments and instrumental practices represented 2/ then, the level of the cultural foundations of images and their rhetoric modus operandi 3/ finally, by adopting a synaesthetic approach to images and sounds to try to understand how to describe the sounds of instruments when they are "produced" by instrumentalists as peculiar as animals (sounds, noises, harmony, musica, silence?). This synaesthetic approach is also anthropological: as animals imitate human beings, what can be considered musical in both of them? What makes "musicality" and "sonority" criteria that allow us to distinguish and organise creatures in the order of God's creation in a hierarchy according to the medieval understanding of the world? I will discuss these questions from the perspective of the intellectual context: humanism present in princely courts, but also Aristotelianism and Neo-Platonism taught in European Colleges of Arts. These human-centred intellectual traditions have contributed, on one the hand, to develop the natural sciences originating in the Antiquity; and, on the other hand, they have shed a new light on questions pertaining to language and music as parts of rhetoric and poetry. Intellectual innovations of that time have indeed changed the distinctions between human beings and animals, especially through sound and voice, memory and reason.

The method consists in not taking these images of animal musicians in the first degree, to not consider them just as amusing manuscripts decorations. It is a journey from what is visible (the tip of the iceberg) to what is invisible (the underwater portion, the archaeology of knowledge and cultural genealogies). Beast musicians have (ancient) cultural origins, (mnemonic and conceptual) medieval practices and (anthropological) meanings that go beyond visual images.

I. Instrumental practices of animal musicians

Let us start with some examples, which depict a mundus inversus between beasts and people, "normal" and "abnormal" practices, and sound and silence. These images are from 14 th -and 15 th -century books of prayer.

1) Mundus inversus and sonorous instruments

Animal musicians were represented with a rather repetitive instrumentarium from one manuscript to another, which mainly consisted of:

-bagpipes -fiddles -drums -and spherical bells and small bells.

These are the same instruments as those played at that time. They are sonorous, which does not mean that they are boisterous. Although their association with beasts was common, it remains astonishing. Visually, this association creates a mundus inversus. It also reminds us that images were not reproductions of reality and instead, they fell in the characteristically medieval "figurative mode of thinking" as established by Pierre Francastel.

2) Mundus inversus and silence

Animal musicians also achieved mundus inversus through silence. Indeed, they used unique and original "sonorous objects" that no other illustrated "musician" used, namely the bellows, cauldron, rake, jaw, hay bale and grill. These are no musical instruments, yet animals used them as such. They were diverted from their true functions, and although they were played like musical instruments, only produced silence. The intentionality of producing sound is established but not achieved.

The modes of representation of silence are a jaw made out of bones pretending to play the fiddle, and a monkey without instrument also pretending to play the fiddle with a simple stick; bellows replaced the fiddle and plucking replaced bowing.

The inversion is twofold: animals imitated playing musical instruments, which remained silent, and these "instruments" were objects that could not produce sounds.

Indeed, the blow of the bellows was associated with a string instrument instead of being assigned to a wind instrument, and the jaw made out of bones evoked the soundboard, but its inert, inanimate matter prevented it from vibrating and therefore producing sounds. Similarly, in the case of the monkey musician, the absence of instrument, the void, depicted silence. The inability to produce sounds thus induces a contradiction: the intentionality of emitting musical sonorities but producing none.

However, to better understand the surprising musical practices of animals, they must be compared to the types of manuscripts that featured them to analyse the cultural, rhetorical and cognitive reasons for their iconographic development. This is my second major point.

II. Images: cultural foundations of images of animal musicians

2) Ancient rhetoric used to name and explain inverted and "abnormal" musical practices

At a time (1300-1450) when speech (preaching, poetry, chant) prevailed in culture and society, images were words made visible and audible. This technique belonged to the rhetorical vocabulary and mnemonic processes featured in Cicero's and Quintilian's oral treaties, which accounted for the visual and acoustic modus operandi of animal musicians in medieval images.

Firstly, we can establish a parallel between their representations and the word pictura. Isidore of Seville used the antique definition: "an image that depicts the appearance of a thing." 1 As established by Rhetorica ad Herennium 2 echoed in St.

Augustine's Confessions (Book X, Ch. 8), the aim of picturae is to remind readers what they want to remember, for as long as possible, in the heart of their memory.

The more wonderful and surprising the forms, the more efficient and lasting their imprint in the readers' memory.

Like their contemporaries at the University, illuminators were accustomed to these picturae that functioned as voces animantium. These images related words (for 1 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, liber XIX, 16.

2 Ad Herennium, III, xxii. instance, the image of a bear to say "urs"); they were vocal, voices, or sonorous words, which represented beast musicians, birds, chimeras, etc. As explained by Mary Carruthers, these "things" were alive and vocal because they were set in motion. These imagines rerum originated in the Bestiary, Aesop's fables, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pliny's Natural History, The Etymologies of Isidore, the Bible, etc.

Their visual and vocal forms gave them a mnemonic purpose. Albertus Magnus, for instance, placed great emphasis on the necessity to use these fabulous images to "potently strike" people's memory and enable them to learn and know about the world. However, it is hard to picture them from an acoustic point of view today: what does the lion playing the fiddle "say" in Reginald of Bar's Breviary?

Then, animal musicians exemplify the stylistic device called inversio. It was best known as permutatio in Latin and, most of all, as allêgoria in Greek, which means using a word that conveys a double meaning. According to Quintilian, inversio is to mean the contrary of what is stated. 3 We have seen examples of inverted instrumental practices in the first part.

Finally, marginal animal musicians pertained to nature's mundus inversus.

This topos enlivened and belonged to encyclopaedic and moral poems in the ancient tradition of allegorical poetry. 4 It was based on adynata or impossibilia, meaning "the association of incompatible things." The ancient technique of adynata in Greek and impossibilia in Latin was perpetuated in medieval poetry and images. A donkey with a lyre, a bullock dancing, a fearful lion (like that featured in Reginald of Bar's Breviary) etc. were some of the oldest adynata still in use in the Middle Ages. They can be found for instance in Carmina Burana, where animals talk. Through inversion, impossibilia were used for the social satire of the church, chivalry, courtly love, etc. in romances (Reynard the Fox), fabliaux, and, during the same period, in the margins of manuscripts. They were also used in preachers' exempla, and could be found in the works of authors including Pieter Brueghel (Dutch Proverbs, 1559, Berlin, Staatliche Museen, Gemälde Gallery), François Rabelais (Pantagruel) and Jean de La Fontaine (Fables.)

3) Seeing sounds and the sense of hearing: images of beast musicians provide an opportunity to see and hear = they relay the theories of physics and natural philosophy, particularly that of Aristotle

Some of the manuscripts in Aristotle's Metaphysics translated by William of Moerbeke5 (c. 1325) were also illuminated with animals and hybrid musicians. The movement of their colourful and contorted bodies is striking in these books. They make the Aristotelian principle of movement -a component in the production and perception of sounds -tangible and perceptible in terms of potency (dynamis) and action (enargeia): movement in the air produces sound (percussum), makes it audible and offers people access to knowledge. This is, in very broad terms, the summarised version of the Aristotelian theory of sensation as presented in Physics and De Anima.

The parallel between physics and representations of animal musicians can be established at the time of encyclopaedias, which were profusely copied and translated: animals were believed to be both the cause of the sensation and the visual expression of its perception; the shape of their moving bodies reportedly produced sounds and impacted the senses of sight and hearing; and they purportedly triggered the memory of sensations and reasoning processes. Thus, sounds and the sense of hearing were connected to sensations and reason and allowed people to access knowledge. They were inseparable from the natura (phusis meaning the movement of growth) and musica (rhythmic and sonorous motion). This is my third and final major point.

III. The animal musicus: what is musical in animals vs. people?

Music is a criterion that allows distinctions to be made between animals and people: musica (Pythagoras, Plato) is the science of numerus and is founded on ratio, mensura and proportio. Being endowed with reason, people understand musical science, and, as a result, they differ from beasts. The example of St.

Augustine comparing the virtuosity of harpists and flute players to the nightingales' songs is a known occurrence (De Musica, 6). However, in images, music, sound and the sense of hearing were characteristic of both human beings and animals. As explained by Elizabeth Eva Leach6 and Jean-Marie Fritz, vox usually refers to all things that resonate and all sounds produced by language or any other mode of sound production.

Grammatically, it (vox) corresponds to the audible form of the word: the sound is a voice, that of human beings, however, as explained by Aristotle, Donatus, Priscian, St. Augustine, Isidore of Seville, Guido of Arezzo, John Cotton, Albertus Magnus, etc., all sounds are not a vox verbum with a semantic content. This confusion comes from the inversion between animals and humans, between instruments and "normal" The confusion between people and animals is obvious if one focuses solely on animal musicians featured in images. However, once they are connected to the entire illuminated codex, it becomes clear that decorations established a hierarchy of natura and creatures, which was based on music. Indeed, animal musicians, such as jugglers, were always connected to King David who was featured in the first image of the Psalter or Book of Hours. His representation made up the Bildeinsatz, which introduced what followed. The purpose of this introductory image (called ekphrasis in rhetoric) was to file "things" (res) to be remembered during the reading (legere, put together, connect) in the readers' memory.

David is the ultimate archetype, hyper-theme of musicus. According to the Book of Samuel, David appeased the wrath of King Saul with the melodies of his harp; like a juggler (jogler), he danced naked before of the Ark of the Covenant; as a harpist, he composed psalms inspired by the dove of the Holy Spirit (Luttrell Psalter); he knew the musical laws of harmony and represented the world order. Featured in the introduction of the psalter, his image structured the musical and rational hierarchy of the illuminated page. Animal musicians were his subordinates, inferior to him because of their animal nature and low rationality. Jugglers, minstrels and birds were found between them and David. Therefore, in images, animal musicians and people did have music in common, but to a lesser extent: their music was set at the sensory level (the mind and soul), it was intended for the senses rather than intelligence. Thus, it differentiated people and animals through the hierarchy of creatures.

Beast musicians also indicated the distinction between people and animals from the readers' perspective. As senses were essential to the imaginative and rational capabilities of the soul, images of animals thus played an important sensory and mnemonic role for readers. Indeed, their purpose was fundamentally moral in nature. In the tradition of psychomachia, the conflict between vices and virtues, they helped the readers to remember and morally convert: they were mnemonic symbols of vices and virtues, but also of the Genesis before and after the Fall of Adam. Thus, they contributed to make the readers (believers) human beings endowed with reason and not animals, while revealing their animal side -the frontier between animals and people is a thin one. Along with psalm singing and the model of David -Praefigura Christi, they helped to make the readers Christians concerned for the salvation of their soul.

Conclusion

Thus, animal musicians make readers see and hear the harmony and disharmony of nature. As elements making up the ornatus of the codex, they make

  How are we to explain the development of representations of animal musicians, especially in books produced from 1300 to 1450? As representations were mostly featured in psalters and books of hours, then what was the nature of their relationship with the text and book they decorated? Based on ancient rhetoric and natural philosophy, especially that of Aristotle, what cognitive and memory processes were used to produce effects (which ones?) on the readers' senses (sight, hearing) and memory? 1) Why are there animals and music in manuscripts and why are they associated in images? Animals and music belong to both pagan and Christian ancient culture. In the artes liberales cursus dispensed in schools and at University, they have always been present in encyclopaedias (Pliny the Elder's Natural History, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville) and bestiaries (Physiologus), allegorical poetry (Ovid, Horace, Aesop), grammar (Donatus and Priscian), rhetoric (Quintilian, Rhetorica ad Herennium, Cicero) and ars musicae (St. Augustine, Boethius). Their educational and cultural purposes are not new. What is new is their appearance in the illuminations of 13 th -century manuscripts and the impressive development they underwent in the 14 th century until the middle of the 15 th century. Their "invention," in the words of Frances Yates, probably resulted from the encounter between school cultures and the Aristotelian natural philosophy in the Universities of Paris and Oxford, particularly in the 14 th century. It is believed to have originated from the concurrent reading of De Anima and Aristotle's Physics, Boethius' De Institutione musica combined to Augustinian semiotics (sonus-vox). It also corresponds to the translation and distribution of bestiaries and encyclopaedias in Europe (Bartholomew the Englishman, Vincent of Beauvais, etc.) in the 14 th and 15 th centuries. It was contemporary to the development of polyphonic music (motet) and theories on musica sonora where the relationship between the sign, note, word, sound and voice took on unprecedented scriptural (writing) and musical forms.

  practices. It was used to portray people as what they were and what they were not, or should not be: animals dominated by their animal instincts, monkeys "similitudo hominis" reminiscent of the original sin: people created ad imaginem Dei yet degenerated.

  God's Creation -cosmos (the Greek translation of the Latin word ornatus means what is proper, what is beautiful) -its hierarchy of creatures and "abnormalities" perceptible through the senses of sight and hearing. Together, animal musicians, King David and jugglers, combined to psalm singing, give an aesthetic version of God's Creation while being the instruments of its praise.

Quintilian, Institutes of Oratory 8, 6,

44: "allegoria, quam inversionem interpretantur, aut aliud verbis aliud sensu ostendit aut etiam interim contrarium (…)." 4 Ernst R.Curtius, op. cit.,

Paris, BNF, ms. Lat.

6299, Aristotle's Metaphysics translated by William of Moerbeke, 1 st quarter of the 19 th century, United Kingdom.

Elizabeth EvaLeach, Sungs Birds. Music, nature and Poetry in the Later Middle Ages, Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 2007, p. 24-44.


Economic geology: Gold buried by oxygen

Fabrice Gaillard & Yoann Copard The Witwatersrand Basin in South Africa contains extraordinary amounts of gold. Thermodynamic calculations suggest that the gold may have accumulated there in response to a perfect storm of conditions available only during the Archaean.

The demand for metals continues to grow, but the capital available for prospecting is limited. Scientific innovations and improved understanding of how economically viable mineral deposits form are therefore critical to aid the search for new deposits at moderate cost 1,2 . The Witwatersrand gold deposit in South Africa is the source of 40% of the gold in circulation. This gold was formed 2.6 billion years ago, during the Archaean, but the precise mechanisms for its formation are unclear. Writing in Nature Geoscience, Christoph Heinrich 3 suggests that these extraordinarily rich deposits required abundant volcanism in an oxygenfree atmosphere and life on land, conditions met only during the Archaean.

The amount of gold stored in the continental crust is primarily sourced from magma and cooled magmatic rocks, where it exists in small, diffuse amounts. Most of this gold was endowed in the crust during an intensive magmatic event about 3 billion years ago 4 . Since then, gold has mainly been redistributed within the crust by fluids and accumulated to form large, enriched deposits. On the modern Earth's surface, gold deposition and enrichment only occur by mechanical processes creating placer deposits -sandstones enriched in gold. Such a sedimentary origin is the prevailing hypothesis for the formation of the Witwatersrand deposit 5 .

Gold can also accumulate inside Earth's crust, where it is carried by hydrothermal fluids. In contrast to the mechanical deposition of gold at Earth's surface, the dissolution and precipitation of gold inside the crust, where the availability of oxygen is low, is governed by chemical redox reactions 6 . In most cases, the dissolution of gold in hydrothermal fluids requires soluble sulphur in a reduced form. Metamorphic processes at moderate pressure and temperature can provide the chemical environment for the dissolution of gold, as suggested in an alternative model for the Witwatersrand complex 7 . In this model, gold is already in place as sedimentary placer, and remobilization only occurs locally.

Heinrich 3 offers a novel interpretation for the formation of the Witwatersrand deposit. He suggests that although enrichment of the gold may have taken place at the surface in a fluvial environment similar to that which creates placer deposits, the transport and depositional processes operating were chemical, as occurs in hydrothermal fluids circulating in the deeper crust today. It therefore seems possible that anoxic processes that dissolve, transport and accumulate gold deep inside the modern crust were operating at Earth's surface during the Archaean. Heinrich's claim is founded on thermodynamic calculations of chemical reactions that could have occurred in the surface waters that flowed during the Archaean. At that time, abundant volcanism is thought to have generated sulphur-rich volcanic gases 8 creating acidic rains and surface waters. In an oxygen-free atmosphere, such sulphurous volcanic rain could dissolve gold even at ambient temperatures on Earth's surface. Redox reactions between the dissolved gold and Archaean life, such as microbes and carbonaceous material, could have then triggered the deposition of gold in sediments. Although the amount of gold dissolved in the acid rain would have been small, this process could have accumulated enormous quantities of gold over millions of years.

If correct, Heinrich's model implies that similar surface-formed gold deposits may exist in other Archaean terrains, but not in younger rocks. The absence of oxygen in the Archaean atmosphere promoted a chain of reactions that could not occur at Earth's surface today. About 2.4 billion years ago, a rise in atmospheric oxygen triggered the Great Oxidation Event, which completely modified the biogeochemical processes operating at Earth's surfac 9 . Increasing atmospheric oxygen levels would have chased the surface chemical processes involving gold toward deeper regions of the Earth where oxygen is naturally lacking, forming epithermal, porphyry, orogenic, Carlin-type and intrusion-related ore deposits. Thus, the rise of atmospheric oxygen led to the burial of chemical deposits of gold.

Several burning questions about Heinrich's model will surely be debated. For example, the model requires volcanic rain laden with sulphur. Yet, Archaean waters are known to have been depleted in sulphur compared with modern waters 9 , probably because the majority of volcanism during the Archaean was submarine, rather than subaerial 8 . The Witwatersrand gold deposit also has high osmium contents 5 , implying the gold came originally from the mantle. Heinrich 3 suggests the flood-basalt eruption of the Hlagothi Complex -a large igneous province formed on the Kaapvaal Craton during the Archaean -can satisfy both of these constraints: The long-lived eruption provides a localized, subaerial and sustained source of sulphur-rich volcanic rain and the voluminous erupted basalts provide a mantle source for the gold. But if Heinrich's model delivers a sound mechanism for gold transport in surface waters, it is unclear how osmium, which is abundantly present in the gold deposits, can be carried. Finally, Heinrich's interpretation conflicts with the isotopic signature of the gold deposits, which suggests that the gold particles are older than the sediments hosting the ore 5 . The new mechanism proposed by Heinrich therefore does not bury the two older ones, the placer 5 and the metamorphic fluids 7 , but it paves the way for a new vision of the biogeochemistry of gold during the Archaean (Fig. 1).

Figure 1: The Archaean biogeochemistry of gold and the Witwatersrand gold deposit.

The most probable source for the Witwatersrand gold was the basaltic rocks of the Hlagothi Complex (1), shown on the right. Acidic and sulphurous volcanic rains during the Archaean may have weathered gold from basaltic rocks (2), gold-bearing sulphide (3), and gold-bearing veins (4). Gold deposition as nuggets and bacterioforms could have been triggered by redox reactions with hydrocarbons and cyanobacteria, respectively (5). Yellow arrows indicate transport of gold. Christoph Heinrich 3 suggests that this combination of volcanic gases and acid rain, an oxygen-depleted atmosphere and the rise of organic material in the Archaean provided the perfect conditions for formation of the giant Witwatersrand gold deposit. H 2 S, hydrogen sulphide; H 2 SO 4 , sulphuric acid; SO 2 , sulphur dioxide; H 2 O, water; Au, gold.

The model implies that gold was precipitated in situ, by interaction with microbial mats. The involvement of life and organic compounds has long been discussed for the formation of gold deposits 10 , and in the Witwatersrand complex an active role for Archaean mats has recently been recognized 11 . Bacteria can aid the dissolution of gold under anaerobic conditions 12 . The precipitation of gold generally occurs by chemical redox reactions that involve carbonaceous material, such as hydrocarbons 13 . Gold deposition can also be triggered directly by living organisms, such as algal and microbial communities 12 . Lastly, it is possible that the oxygen-producing cyanobacteria created locally oxygenated surface waters, rendering gold insoluble and triggering its precipitation.

The redox conditions and the possible involvement of life proposed for the Witwatersrand deposit show similitude with the modern wastewaters and sewage sludges worldwide that are gathering substantial concentrations of gold 14 . In these anthropogenic environments, biological ingredients such as bacteria and carbonaceous matter, can lead to the redox accumulation of gold. Curiously, although some clean methodological approaches have been suggested 15 , extraction of gold and other metals from these easily accessible anthropogenic ores has not yet been attempted.

Christoph Heinrich 3 uses thermodynamic calculations to argue that the Witwatersrand Basin was a huge and long-lasting chemical factory, operating and churning out gold thanks to the oxygen-free and volcanic gas-rich nature of the Archaean atmosphere. Organic material and primitive life may also have played a central role. If this model is correct, such deposits may have been common during the Archaean and could be preserved in ancient terrains.