“I spent most of my time preening feathers with tweezers and Q-tips,” recalls Andrew Griebeler, assistant professor in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies (AAHVS).
As an undergraduate at the University of Puget Sound, he worked with the Wing & Tail Image Collection at the Puget Sound Museum of Natural History before graduating with degrees in Biology and Art History. Griebeler has always been captivated with the natural world — thanks to his mother, a biology teacher, who often took the family birding.
Art was also a constant. In high school he developed a serious interest in pre-Columbian art that followed him to college, where an introductory course on Byzantine and Islamic art changed his career path.
“I grew up in Texas where Christianity is prominent,” he explains, “so I found myself drawn to the doctrinal issues in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean and how those issues manifested in the visual arts.”
At the same time, he became captivated by the mosaics and manuscripts of the period that were filled with depictions of plants and animals. This penchant for botany is at the root of Griebeler’s recent book, “Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean,” which explores how premodern botanical illustrations created knowledge about the natural world.
Griebeler studied the rich plant imagery that accompanied the texts and focused on how these botanical illustrations functioned within the original documents. At first, he was wrapped up in the scholarship that talked about the errors and inaccuracies of the illustrations.
“The literature took for granted that the images were created to complement the text rather than the text complementing the illustrations,” he explains. “The more I studied the drawings, the more I felt that the established narratives about these books were incorrect.”
In the classroom, Griebeler seeks to avoid approaches and discourses that reduce and uncomplicate the past at the expense of grasping it in its complexity.
“Look at the Middle Ages, for example. There is this common idea that there was a monolithic religion, and everyone fell in line,” he explains. “Life was awful, and no one had any agency, freedom of thought or ability to observe the world around them.
It’s the perfect foil to modernity — but I disagree with that assessment.”
This fall, Griebeler is teaching Visual Culture in Late Antiquity and Art & Architectural History of the Islamic World, but he also wants to find spaces for greater collaboration between the humanities and sciences at Duke. For Griebeler, his scholarship and research in the science, art and natural world of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages not only relate but also benefit one another, providing a richer understanding of that time in history.
“These things have deep roots.”