In this dissertation I show how ties between Early Netherlandish painting and pageantry spectacles point to a distinct fifteenth-century conception of pictorial naturalism as figurative animation. In the fifteenth-century, painters were the primary designers of spectacles and the two media also shared patrons and a formal and critical vocabulary. Focusing on key artifacts and spectacles produced in the orbit of the influential Valois Burgundian ducal court between 1420 and 1478, I analyze the joint genesis, conception, and reception of painting and pageantry to argue that the proliferating interest in pictorial naturalism was driven by an ontological, rather than epistemological preoccupation.

In Chapter I, "Living Pictures," I focus on the Ghent Altarpiece and a 1420 Passion staging to retrace the Pygmalionesque-Promethean metaphor that governed the production and reception of Early Netherlandish painting. Drawing on period texts, I show that before 1550 the ubiquitous Middle French terms for pictorial naturalism apres le vif and au vif, regularly applied to both paintings and spectacles, denoted a painting brought to, rather than (as hitherto presumed) from, life. I then distinguish fifteenth-century conceptions of contact and verisimilitude from the modern concept of indexicality. Tying the animation metaphor to such discourses as medical alchemy, as well as to paradigmatic texts such as the Roman de la rose, I contextualize this trope within the broader period preoccupation with eschatology and agency. Chapter II, "Painting Spectacle." is concerned with painters' involvement in pageantry production. Analyzing accounting records---most closely a full set preserved from the 1468 Bruges wedding of Duke Charles the Bold with the English Princess Margaret of York---I establish that painters were the primary designers of stages, and, moreover, that patrons thought of stagecraft as painting. This medium indistinction evinces the somatic viewing experience encoded into imagery of both two- and three-dimensions in the fifteenth century, setting ontological equivalence as the inevitable conceptual horizon for naturalistic painting. In Chapter III, "Making Histories," I trace connections between the 1478 theatricalized ducal baptism of Philip the Handsome in Bruges, contemporized paintings of sacred history, and ekphrastic historiography such as Christine de Pizan's 1403 Livre de la mutacion de fortune, to show that the epistemology of fifteenth-century imagery au vif was anchored in virtuous authorial agency rather than objectivity-connoting immediacy.

Establishing that a preoccupation with the animation of the image, rather than any budding sensibility for immediacy or objectivity, shaped that crucial moment of resurging interest in pictorial naturalism, I decouple some of the first naturalistic easel paintings from the rise of the modern indexicality paradigm of naturalism. This dissertation thus effects a significant revision to the art-historical account of the transition from medieval to Renaissance painting.