ABSTRACT
The text and images moreover offer insight into medieval representational theory as understood by a thirteenth-century artisan. Careful attention to the terms employed by Villard de Honnecourt as he sought to guide the reception of his portfolio enables to recover much of the substance of those theories and allows to analyze the manner in which they informed actual artistic practice. Referring to two different images of lions, Villard twice instructs his reader to 'know well' that his pictures of lions were 'counterfeited from life'. Villard's term 'portraiture' ultimately derives from the Latin verb protrahere—to draw forth, extract, or reveal—which had been used by Roman authors a millennium earlier; Old French permutations of the term first appeared in the later twelfth century. The meaning of Villard's expression 'al vif' is relatively straightforward. Villard's use of the expressions portraiture and contrefais al vif thus has implications for the way to understand the art of the later Middle Ages.
