ABSTRACT
Cassiodorus considered it the duty of the chronicler to record the "imagines historiarum" in order to tell the truth. "Imagines" and "historiae" together are the two basic, defining elements of the illustrated manuscript: handwritten narratives accompanied by images called pictures. This special rhetorical treatment is the cognitive and imaginative link between the verbal text and the pictorial text it generates, between what author has called pictures from words and words from pictures. The four examples of manuscript illumination used in this paper present two groupings, those with marginalia and those without, which resolve the question of pictorial meaning in two ways. The split-shield is one of the most curious shields in all of romance literature. The split-shield episode appears to be a relatively frequent subject for illustration. The chapter examined the episode as illustrated in four manuscripts from the late thirteenth to the late fourteenth centuries, the high period of Gothic illumination.
