The whole object

What Does an Image Remember?

At first glance, this is a picture of a banana. Look longer and the image begins to accumulate histories.

A plant whose deeper ancestry lies thousands of kilometres east of the manuscript's probable place of production. A cultivated crop moved by people into environments where its wild ancestors had never grown. A name written into another language. A fruit placed beside an orange, painted onto paper, and incorporated into an attempt to describe the created world.

The folio cannot tell us precisely when every banana variety travelled, who carried it, or which route brought the particular plant known to the people who made this manuscript. Archaeology itself cannot yet answer all of those questions.

But the image establishes something quieter. By the early fifteenth century, the banana could appear on this page without explanation as an impossibly foreign thing. It had a name. It had a shape. It had a place within an ordered universe.

The banana no longer needed an introduction. It belonged on the page.