ABSTRACT
The main focus of this chapter is a relatively 'minor' figure in the Franciscan order, the magister Bartholomaeus de Bononia, author of sermons and of a compendium, the De Luce, which is credited with containing 'perhaps more information about light than any other single medieval work' The collections of sermons of the Pisan, whose activity is widely documented and studied, contain a large amount of valuable hints into the metaphoric and symbolic meanings attributed to light and colours. As colours cannot exist without the light of the sun, so light and human virtues have no means of being without divine grace. By means of analogies and parallelisms, the Franciscan 'paints' a mental picture through his words, rendering a visual form of metaphysical reality and of human inwardness. Thus, readers of the tractatus find themselves thinking of the divine and their own intellectual and emotional dimension in terms of shapes, colours and tangible consistency.
