Poetik der Visualität

In recent decades the poetics of the visual has attracted increased scholarly interest in cultural and historical studies; but so far, the topic has rarely been considered from intercultural perspectives. A revealing example of this is Wolfram von Eschenbach’s medieval poem Parzival, composed shortly after 1200, that suggests that his author was – at least to some extent – familiar with the arabian knowledge of his time, as transmitted through the Iberian translation Centre of Toledo. The metaphorical language of the poem evokes contrasts of light and darkness, the phenomenon of haziness and the play of colours. So far, hardly any attempt has been made to relate these motifs to contemporaneous Arabic theory of optics. Influential thinkers such as Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) studied the structure of the eye, the radiation of light, as well as the effects of reflection and refraction. Whereas these ideas would spread in occidental science only over the course of the 13th century (via Roger Bacon and others), Wolfram’s Parzival ‘reflects’ elementary components of Arabian optics already in an earlier period.