The eye, according to long-established tradition, is construed as a portal linking the outer, physical world and the inner world of the mind. Nowhere is this communicative liminal function more manifest than in the celebrated illumination that opens the unique manuscript of an anonymous latethirteenth- or early-fourteenth-century mise en vers of the physician, cleric, and poet Richard de Fournival's Bestiaires d'amour (BnF ms fr 1951, fol. 1). Personified Memory stands in a gothic arched doorway flanked by two lancets; the disembodied eye floating in the aperture to the left, and the ear in its pendant to the right, give visible form to the metaphor of the senses as portals to the mind and heart. This iconography reinforces the specific pathway by which the eye conveys images to the mind, where they are impressed in the memory; the position of the eye to the left side of the picture, where the viewer's eyes first fall, underlines its position atop the hierarchy of the senses; and the illumination's association with Fournival's text reminds the reader that the eye and ear often facilitate the production of mental images that are specifically amorous in nature.

The Bestiaires d'amour illumination is positioned at a crucial juncture, not just in the book it illustrates, but in the development of the sensory model of love it promulgates. While Richard de Fournival and his imitator, like their French and Occitan predecessors, do underline the importance of sensory perception (especially vision) in love, their constructs tend to be rather loosely conceived and bear at best a tenuous relationship to contemporary scientific understanding of the mechanics of vision.