Abstract EN:

This thesis reviews illustrations of the universe from the XIIIth century and their development until the XVIth century in the light of scientific sources and the theory of the space. It relies on a corpus comprising three main sources: the diagrams of cosmology drawn and copied in manuscripts, notably those by Sacrobosco, Albert the Great and Gossuin de Metz; the iconography of the Genesis from the IXth to the XVIth century; the theory of the place (locus) and the sphere as an orientated place (situs) in several treaties by Albert the Great. The compilation of these three sources of different nature (diagrams, texts, images) allows to shed light from a new perspective on the history of the theory of the space. Often analysed from a form, the “perspective”, which however originated in Florence at the beginning of the XVth century only, the spatiality of medieval images has been recorded in a teleology that reduces the XIIIth and the XIVth centuries to precursory roles. The new sources that have been mobilized, by showing in detail the omnipresent use, during the period at the end of the Middle Ages, of the geometry of the sphere and its artistic, scientific and philosophical variations, rather invite to consider the spatiality of this period in its singularity.