Catalogues

Medieval Art - An Introduction

At the beginning of the third millennium, our ideas about the Middle Ages are more sophisticated. Although generations of schoolchildren still equate the Middle Ages with the Dark Ages (6th century), the neo-gothic Romantic filter is a dim memory, and "dungeons and dragons" have found their place in computer games. Instead, we now know that the Carolingian renaissance is a forerunner of European Union, that the Romanesque period developed the first truly indigenous pan-European style and that the great Gothic cathedrals are, looking back on these two millenia, Western Europe's most imposing and enduring monuments to date. In dealing with works from this latter period I have seen more than one person feeling inspired by them without knowing why. One thought because in comparison to these markedly original works, the academic resuscitation of obscure Greek legends and motifs from the later Renaissance to the 19th century began to seem contrived, if not decadent. Another because after centuries of destruction and deconstruction the figure of Christ as well as His Mother, the two most common subjects in medieval art, now appear as remote yet compelling as a Buddha.

Gothic Genius

There are various views about the time-span occupied by "gothic" art, a term which first took its meaning, in a negative manner, from the Italian humanists who dismissed it as the barbaric interval between the antique (classical) and its revaluation in the Renaissance. Today, we use the term as an art historical distinction of style between this latter and what preceded it, the Romanesque. The agreed time is roughly from 1150 to the end of the 15th century. Within this span there is a further distinction which Panofsky [1] summarised as Early, High and Late, or, in the architectural terminology which is the foundation for stylistic classification, as Early, Radiant and Flamboyant. Precisely because it is an architectural distinction defined by the use of the ogive arch one must be wary of applying "gothic" to other disciplines, - sculpture, painting, - which show much greater diversity within this time frame. However, by 1400, its success, and the patronage of the likes of Jean Duke of Berry and Gian-Galeazzo Visconti, has enabled art historians to speak of "International Gothic". Of course, the gothic period found different forms of expression in different countries at different times, lasting much longer in England and Spain for example, even into the early 16th century, than in Italy, and subsequently France, where the renaissance took root in the 15th century.

Gothic art first appeared at a time of economic and intellectual expansion in the 12th century, and flowered in the 13th, when knowledge began to be organised and totalised into logical Summa, and not just loosely compiled into encyclopaedias. It is a commonplace to say that the works of St Thomas Aquinas, Dante's Divine Comedy, but also Cathedrals were constructions drawing on all the science available at the time [2] .

Though the Middle Ages had as many indifferent artists as any period, it is worthwhile investigating the singular beauty of many of the surviving pieces. Abbot Suger's enthusiastic ambitions for his new St Denis and St Bernard's condemnation of the morally ambiguous beauty of Romanesque capitals are the two most frequently cited sources concerning the notion of an aesthetic sentiment or programme in the Middle Ages. Of course, as Jean Wirth has pointed out [3] this masks the fact that there was no discourse on Art at the time (this being a 19th century invention). "Artistic" activity was ranged under the "Artes Mechanicae" like engineering or surgery.

Paradoxically, we in turn value these works precisely because they predate the invention of printing, and all the other forms of "mechanical" reproduction that followed in its wake. Thus we endeavour to distinguish the slavish copy from the one where artisan or scribe has put something of himself in it, while remembering that most artists worked from copies, without shame, moreover, as only God was deemed able to "create". To take a pertinent example, neo-gothic work of the 19th century is often an embarrassing copy if not a downright fake, whereas Art Nouveau is a refreshing translation or reinvention in a new idiom of medieval decorative principles.

The second paradox is that we rarely have a signature from a medieval work, yet because every single one is made by hand, there is always a trace of this hand (and hence the mind) on the object it fashioned. This establishes the relation of communication between two individuals, - any one of us and the original artist -, which is indispensable for the enjoyment of what we call a work of art. It also challenges us into scrutinising the collection of traits, the singularities of a "hand", that make up a style and are the true signature of a work.

Hence the third paradox: that we rarely have an "artist" as such with a name. Scholars instead say "Master.of the St Ursula Legend", or "Boucicaut Master", thereby following the medieval appellation (retained in Magister Artium) of a Master in his workshop with pupils. In fact, as a trade which was to be organised into Guilds, across a range of materials, these artists were called "Ymagiers", and the Prevot of Paris in 1254, Etienne Boileau, listed a 101 corporations involved in image-making. Any Ymagier could, and often did, work in more than one medium, illumination and glass painting for example.

Moralised Art

There was no discipline called aesthetics nor was there a notion of "art for art's sake", yet artistic practice rested on the most solid of foundations, that is, structural rather than "decorative" ones. From St Augustine onwards, most scholars commented on the sentence from the Book of Wisdom (11,12) that God "ordered all things according to measure, number and weight". In this question of the mathematical basis of beauty, the middle ages was perfectly in tune with the ancients well before the Renaissance. They drew on Boethius who had consolidated the Pythagorean principle of beauty, as a relation of harmony or consonance between the parts and the whole. When Vitruvius (who was quoted by Vincent de Beauvais in the 13th century) said that the "decor of a temple only appeared when the form was consistent with the idea of the divinity to which it was dedicated and which it recalled symbolically", he could have had a cathedral in mind.

The structure or order uncovered in "all things" also covered the content and was based on two general presuppositions. The first was that all of Nature was beautiful because it was made by one Creator. The second was that this nature had to be moralised. These underpin most artistic expression in the gothic middle ages. The two together make up the remarkably joyous nature of medieval art which de Bruyne called "aesthetic optimism". Nature was seen as the thought of God [4] hence nothing in nature was extraneous to God. All of life was beautiful. St Augustine, in his commentary on the phrase from Wisdom, shows that even worms, because they have measure, number and weight, have a place. Secondly, as man was made in God's image, nothing was more beautiful, after God, than what resembled God most: man. However, as man was given stewardship over nature he had, and still has, to make choices with respect to it. This inescapable moral dimension of our existence was given a particular focus in the middle ages. The optimism of the time saw this relation as oriented in a particular direction: salvation. Since St Paul, the idea of salvation had given rise to a whole new doctrinal programme: drawing out correspondences between the Old and the New Testaments, in such a way that the one could be shown to prefigure the other. This relation also came to be defined as the literal (historical) sense and its moral counterpart. This is the basis of medieval symbolism as of allegory. It is most clearly embodied in the proliferation of medieval texts beginning "Speculum.". Everything in this world could be read as a mirror image of something else and correspondingly any image made by an artist had two levels of meaning. One of the most beautiful products of this way of seeing is the "Moralised Bible" of c. 1220 in which the links between Old and New testaments are shown in parallel rows of miniatures [5] .

It is a relation which extended to the whole of creation. This is what was meant by the moralising of that other Book of God's called Nature [6] . It is no more than what we have rediscovered today as the fact that man affects all of nature as a matter of course, whether for good or ill. Ugly, therefore, was only what did not share in salvation, whatever refused the form-giving power of the second figure of the Trinity, the Word. The symbol of that optimism, which has become a stylistic trait so common as to go unremarked, is embodied in the numerous dragons and lions subjected to the power of the Word, especially in manuscript illumination [7] .

Just as it values structure over decoration, Medieval art deals with substance (in the scholastic sense as something credited with existence) rather than appearance; yet paradoxically, as with Plato, the invisible was given more being than what was perceived by the senses. When Emile Male said medieval art was eminently symbolic he meant that it centred on a symbolic system in which the visible pointed to the spiritual and where standard figures, Saints with their attributes for example, were embodiments of values.