Originally published in French in 2004 (Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales), Marta Madero’s study, Tabula Picta: Painting and Writing in Medieval Law, offers a provocative glimpse into an important theoretical discourse on painting and writing, a premodern body of thought and argument that remains largely unknown to art historians. Working from medieval and early modern legal glosses and commentaries on the Digest and the Institutes (the code of civil law promulgated by the Emperor Justinian I in the sixth century), Madero’s book examines the tabula picta (painted panel) and its conceptual sibling, the case of writing on a support or material surface such as papyrus, wax and ivory tablets, parchment, or paper.

Medieval and early modern legal thinkers exploited the tabula picta as a kind of thought experiment to articulate, explore, and respond to a series of legal and conceptual questions that resonate powerfully even today: On what grounds can the materials of art making be said to be transformed into works of art? What is the ontological relationship (or difference) between painting and its support? What phenomenal role does the process of making play in relation to the constitution or valuation of a finished work? What influence does designation or naming exert over the ontological identity of an object? What is the status of the work of art after its material dissolution or disappearance? What relationship—be it of analogy, difference, conflation—exists between written language and painting or drawing?

While scholars of Western medieval and Byzantine art have long been alert to the significance of theology and ritual for the history of medieval images, objects, and monuments, in Tabula Picta Madero elucidates a parallel theorization of the work of art (and to a lesser degree, of writing), organized in relation to the category of property, rather than via claims to referential transcendence, sacred immanence, or paradigms of emanation or participation. Interpreting a complex and sometimes contradictory corpus of legal commentaries, Madero’s study reveals the crucial role that the category of property played in defining the artwork’s place within a larger premodern order of things.

Chapter 1 examines how jurists classified and interpreted material changes in an object (addition, transformation, reduction, extinction) and their various effects on the determination of dominium or ownership. A series of legal terms and concepts summarily introduced in chapter 1 are explored in greater detail by subsequent chapters. Chapters 2 (“Accessio”) and 3 (“Specificatio”) treat two modes of material change that bear on the final determination of an object’s ownership. By accessio, Madero argues, the jurists envisioned forms of material change analogous to organic or biological paradigms (implantation, growth, birth) as well as spatial occupation or extension (surface coverage or an allover relationship between an image and its support). Specificatio, by contrast, referred to a change of species, the transformation of pre-existent objects or materials into a new specific object.

Accessio and specificatio were not the only rationales governing premodern legal conceptions of painting and writing. As Madero explores in chapter 4 (“Form, Being and Name”), jurists were equally alert to the role played by language—in particular, acts of naming or designation (appellatio)—in the formation and transformation of objects. The complex tradition of legal speculation about the interplay of words and forms treated in this chapter surely merits more extended analysis. The questions raised by Madero’s sources and her all too brief analysis are difficult and important: in five-and-a-half printed pages they can only be conjured rather than fully considered.

Chapter 5 examines ferruminatio and adplumbatio, terms that played a major role in premodern discussions of objects as property generally, and in the more particular, and conceptually difficult, cases of painting and writing, specifically. As Madero elucidates, ferruminatio and adplumbatio designated two distinct modes of incorporating material into an object. Madero initially defines ferruminatio as a mode of material union or combination resulting in “a continuity of substance, a full and definitive coherence,” and adplumbatio as a process that combines or “unites without continuity of substance” (53). As the chapter progresses, however, stable definitions for the two terms prove elusive and Madero’s reading of the legal sources reveals how ferruminatio and adplumbatio were mutually implicated in a complex dialectic that resists tidy categorization. Commentaries on the two terms, Madero argues, reveal the roles jurists assigned to processes and materials in establishing the ontology, value, and identity (or “oneness”) of works. In the sources we encounter sustained questioning of art as process, product, and property: Is a painting nothing more or less than a series of material layers that retain some kind of ontological and legal autonomy from the finished work and each other? Could a painting be separated from its support and remain a painting?

In chapter 6 (“Factae and Infectae”), Madero examines how legal theorists and scholastic thinkers distinguished between materia and substantia and, by extension, between raw materials, processed materials, and the slippery categories of factae and infectae things. Translated literally, facta and infecta may be taken to designate “made” and “unmade” things; yet, contrary to modern assumptions, Madero shows that premodern distinctions between the categories of factum and infectum were not primarily concerned with the agency or absence of human manufacture. Commentators and glossators instead developed criteria for assessing the difference between facta and infecta organized primarily in relation to form and formlessness. Thus the factum category is perhaps best understood in relation to the example of a metal which, as a material, the jurists explain, never loses its “name” (silver, iron, etc.), no matter what specific form is imposed upon it (specificatio) or given the loss of that form (extinctio) (68–70).

Taken together, chapters 7 through 10 explore several legal-theoretical rationales developed to account for the internal dynamics governing an object’s constitution, its valuation, and the determination of its ownership. Grounded in the legal concept of praevalentia, a “law of attraction” in which one aspect of a property was deemed to trump or appropriate another according to a (contested) range of criteria, Madero shows how the cases of painting and writing allowed jurists to variously conceptualize value, independent of the cost of materials (73).

In the conclusion, Madero briefly sketches a broader intellectual-historical context for the tabula picta and the premodern legal theorization it provoked. Stressing the productive tension between a “material-based rationale” and medieval jurists’ recurring invocation of “value” as a paramount criterion in the determination of dominium, Madero suggests that study of the tabula picta case foregrounds the difficulty of all analysis of historical conceptions of value (99). In legal discussions of the tabula picta, value is not “a term of dichotomy,” but rather a powerful “intrinsic rationale in the very definition of things” developed by jurists without recourse to “any rationale of representation or meaning” (the two fascinating exceptions to this rule being the jurists Placentinus and Odofredo, who develop iconographic criteria for the valuation of painting) (99, 100). Premodern theorizations of the tabula picta, Madero concludes, offer a point of entry into a taxonomic ambient in which reasoning about materiality amounted to nothing less than “a way of naming and ordering the experience of the senses” (100).

The conceptual horizons explored by Tabula Picta demarcate a heady world of thoughts about material objects, about how works come to be and to be undone, about how the category of property is tested and refashioned by works of art, and how works of art, as forms of property, challenge foundational accounts of matter, substance, form, and being. Although Tabula Picta should be required reading for all historians interested in the conceptual history of the category of the work of art, Madero’s volume—like its premodern sources—is an intensely hermetic work whose structure and mode of argumentation can, at times, be taxing.

In chapter after chapter, Madero’s reader is plunged in medias res into highly technical legal discussions. Little historical orientation is offered to the reader about individual jurists or the intellectual genealogies and debates that shaped their thought until the volume’s conclusion, and there it is too little and too late to be useful to non-specialists. The brevity of many of the book’s chapters leaves the reader wanting further elucidation and interpretation, and historical sources are often cited and translated with insufficient analysis. In a study in which legal glosses loom large, one wanted more glossing of the textual evidence from the volume’s author.

In this vein, it is unfortunate that Madero does not direct the reader to her own extremely lucid preliminary statement of her argument (“Tabula Picta. L’écriture, la peinture et leur support dans le droit médiéval,” Annales HSS 56, nos. 4–5 (2001): 831–47). Although Tabula Picta adduces further legal sources and gestures (not entirely successfully) toward the evidence of artists’ handbooks, perspectivist treatises, and a broader tradition of scholastic thinking about materiality, Madero’s 2001 article provides a valuable initiation into the principal questions and their stakes, organized in a fashion many readers may prefer. Indeed, while the article cannot substitute for the book, it will prove a helpful vade mecum for readers of the volume.

Madero’s study is not well served by its English translation. With the exception of the translation of Roger Chartier’s foreword, the text is peppered with awkward renderings that periodically strain the bounds of idiomatic English. More seriously, at times the English translation misrepresents Madero’s arguments and her translations of her sources. A careful, but not exhaustive, comparison of the English translation with the original French publication revealed a series of errors. Many of these gaffes are minor; others, however, are more serious. The advent of the use of paper as a writing support in Europe, correctly identified in the French edition as dating to the thirteenth century (Madero 2004, 43), is embarrassingly backdated in the English edition to the “second half of the eighth century” (26). Subtler translation issues are more worrying. Compare Madero’s assertion, “De ces définitions résulte que la catégorie de factum ne désigne pas simplement tout travail imposé à une masse de matière, toute forme de fabrication” (Madero 2004, 99), to the English rendering, “From these definitions, it ensues that the factum category not only applies to all labor on a mass of matter or all forms of manufacture” (69). In this case, Madero’s important insight that the category of the factum is more restricted and refined than a simple qualification of “made from material” or “fabricated” is distorted by an English phrasing implying that the factum is a capacious category, embracing all labor on material and all forms of manufacture.

To give one further example, it is particularly painful to encounter a less than elegant rendering of a crucial phrase in the book’s final paragraph. Beautifully expressing the respect for the past and its conceptual specificity that animates her study as a whole, Madero writes: “Pour comprendre la tabula picta, il faut la resituer dans les séries pour nous étranges dans lesquelles elle prend place . . .” (140). The English translation (“In order to understand the tabula picta, one must restore it in the series of things that are odd to us, where it belongs . . .”) distorts Madero’s sensitive commentary into an awkward and unsubtle assertion of brute historical distance and the “oddity” of antiquated habits of thought (101). One might excuse this as an isolated instance of inelegant translation but for the frequency of such infelicities: Madero’s understated argument en français is too often either misunderstood or misrepresented by her English translators to pass without comment.

Further, it appears that the English edition’s translations of Latin texts were made from Madero’s French translations, rather than the original language. Although many of the English translations of Latin are passable, a significant number of them read like the products of a game of interlinguistic “telephone”: they cannot be relied upon. Readers should also be aware that the index included in the English edition is quite uneven. A quick review revealed the absence of numerous cited jurists, key technical terms, and in chapter 9 alone (a chapter of five pages) this reviewer found ten direct or indirect citations of the Digest and the Institutes that should have appeared in the index and did not.

Despite these criticisms of the English edition, Madero’s Tabula Picta is an important work of intellectual and legal history that makes available a fascinating and theoretically rich body of thought about the status of painting and writing, of materiality and value, and of the work of art and its participation in the category of property. Patient and careful readers of Madero’s volume will find in its pages a theorization of the art object before modernity that art historians have yet to acknowledge, let alone explore.