Medieval Art

What Medieval Art Is

Medieval art is the art of Europe during the Middle Ages, made in the long stretch between the collapse of Roman rule in the west and the start of the Renaissance. The Getty Research Institute, whose thesaurus is the standard reference for period names, dates it from the Christianised Roman Empire in the fifth century to a Renaissance that began somewhere between the thirteenth century and the fifteenth, depending on which country you are talking about.[1]

That vagueness at the end is deliberate and worth understanding early. The Middle Ages did not stop on a particular date. Italy moved on first, and northern Europe carried on making what we would call medieval art for another century or more. Any single end date you see quoted is a simplification.

The Getty's summary of what changed across the period is a useful one-line description: medieval style is the Greco-Roman tradition of antiquity absorbing Christian subject matter, the art of the Celtic and Germanic peoples, and the culture of the new towns full of free men.[1] In other words, it is what happened when the classical world stopped being the only source and three other things were added to it.

The word covers a thousand years, six or seven distinct styles and most of a continent. It is a period label rather than a movement, and nobody working inside it thought of themselves as medieval.

The Periods, in Order

The Middle Ages are divided into named periods, each with its own look. The dates below are the Getty's, and they overlap, because the divisions are partly geographic. Early Christian and Byzantine describe the same centuries in different halves of the Mediterranean.

Cataloguers also use two broad brackets that sit across the named styles. Early Medieval runs from the Migration period to the Romanesque, roughly the fourth century to the eleventh.[2] Late Medieval runs from about 1250 to as late as 1500, and the Getty instructs that it be used only where Gothic or Late Gothic will not do.[3]

Gothic Was an Insult

The best-known word in medieval art was invented to mock it. Italian writers of the later Renaissance coined Gothic as a synonym for barbaric, denouncing the buildings as unrefined and ugly and blaming them on the Gothic tribes who had brought down the Roman Empire.[9]

The Goths had nothing to do with any of it. The style began in northern France some seven hundred years after the Gothic invasions, and the name is a piece of Renaissance contempt that stuck so hard it is now simply the word for the thing.[9]

It did have a name at the time, and a much better one. From the thirteenth century the new way of building was called opus francigenum, the French work.[10] That is what the people who built Chartres and Amiens called what they were doing. The word we use instead was invented by people who despised it, two centuries after the last of it went up.

What Medieval Artists Actually Made

Very little medieval art is a painting on a wall in a frame. The period's great work went into books, windows, metal, ivory and cloth, and into the stone of buildings. Knowing the categories makes a museum's medieval room far easier to read.

Why It Looks the Way It Does

The single most common complaint about medieval art is that the people in it look wrong. They are flat, stiff, oddly proportioned, and they float in gold rather than standing in a room. That was a choice, and the institutions that catalogue the work describe it as one.

Early Christian art, says the Getty, adapts the artistic language of classical antiquity but gives up classical ideals of physical beauty and technical perfection in order to emphasise spirituality and the immaterial world.[23] Byzantine art moves away from Greek naturalism in favour of ritual stylisation intended to suggest the spiritual.[24] Romanesque work across sculpture, glass, illumination, wall painting, ivory and metal is described as flat, stylised and richly ornamented.[25] Migration-period art departs from classical design in favour of stylised ornament, isolated areas of colour and repeating chevrons, crosses, lines and dots.[26]

None of these artists was failing to draw a convincing body. They were not trying to make one.

The change, when it comes, is documented too. High Gothic sculpture and painting of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries are marked by a return to the balance and naturalism of Greek and Roman sculpture.[5] The naturalism a visitor recognises arrives inside the Middle Ages, not after them.

Why Almost Nobody Signed It

Walk through a medieval gallery and the labels name almost no one. That silence is a fact about how the work was made and valued, not a gap in the research.

Some makers are simply unrecorded. Of its Table Fountain, made in Paris around 1320 to 1340 in gilt silver and translucent enamel, the Cleveland Museum of Art says only that the artist is unknown, though he was certainly working from the Gothic buildings around him.[27]

Some signed and lost the credit anyway. A large painted crucifix made in Pisa around 1230 carries a signature at the bottom, but it has become illegible; the museum can offer only that the painter's first name was perhaps Michael.[28]

Where no name survives, art historians invent one from the work itself, and these invented names are then used as though they were real. The Boucicaut Master, active in Paris around 1410 to 1425, is named after the book of hours he made for Jean de Boucicaut, a marshal of France who was taken prisoner by the English at Agincourt in 1415.[29] The Master of the Soissons Diptych is named after the diptych. The Hours of Charles the Noble is credited to the Master of the Brussels Initials and Associates, which is a workshop rather than a person.[14]

Occasionally a name does survive, and it is treated as an event. The Cleveland Museum introduces Berlinghiero, who was dead by 1242, as one of the earliest Italian painters known by name — he lived in Lucca and ran a large workshop that included his sons.[30]

The anonymity reaches the patrons as well. On the Syon Cope, embroidered in England between 1310 and 1320, two small kneeling men appear who may be the monk who owned or commissioned it. The V&A's phrase for him is anonymous to us.[21]

France Invents Gothic

The Gothic style begins at one building outside Paris, and the man responsible left an account of what he was trying to do.

Suger was elected abbot of Saint-Denis in 1122. He built the western front between 1130 and 1140, giving it a rose window of unprecedented size, and laid the first stone of the new chevet at the east end on 14 July 1140.[10][31] He claimed the chevet took three years, three months and three days. It was consecrated on 11 June 1144 in front of King Louis VII, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, and twenty-four bishops and archbishops.[10]

What was new was a combination rather than any single invention: rib vaults used systematically, flying buttresses, large windows of stained glass, and an open unpartitioned east end ringed with radiating chapels.[10] Between them these allowed walls to stop carrying the roof, and once walls were not carrying the roof they could be filled with glass.

Suger's reason was theological. He held that light was divine in essence and was the very word of God, and he described the effect of his new chevet as lux mirabilis et continua, admirable and uninterrupted light.[10] On the church portal he had it inscribed that beauty leads to the true through material things.[10] He also recorded people laying precious stones into the fabric out of love for Jesus Christ while singing that all your walls are precious stones.[31]

Almost none of his glass is still there. The twelfth-century windows were removed in 1997 and restored, but were judged too fragile to go back, and copies were installed in April 2023. The high windows had already been remade entirely in the middle of the nineteenth century under François Debret and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.[31]

The building also lost its silhouette. On 9 June 1837 lightning struck the ninety-metre spire, which was then taken down.[32] Saint-Denis is 108 metres long, its vaults reach 29 metres, and it has two rose windows more than 12 metres across.[32] From the death of King Dagobert in 639 until the nineteenth century it took the burials of forty kings and twenty-six queens, and it holds about seventy tombs and recumbent effigies today.[32] It became a cathedral only in 1966.[32]

The Most Expensive Object in the Building Was Not the Building

In 1239, after two years of negotiation, Louis IX bought the Crown of Thorns from Baldwin II, the Latin Emperor of Constantinople. Further relics followed in 1241, twenty-two in all, including a fragment of the Cross.[33][34]

The relics cost 135,000 livres tournois, which the Centre des monuments nationaux puts at half the annual revenue of the kingdom of France.[34] The king then needed somewhere to keep them, and the Sainte-Chapelle is what he built: a monumental reliquary, a container for objects that had cost more than it did.[33]

It went up in under seven years, which the CMN calls a record.[34] The upper chapel has fifteen windows, each fifteen metres high, carrying 1,113 scenes from the Old and New Testaments, and two-thirds of that glass is medieval.[35][34] The palette is narrow on purpose: red, blue, two greens, two purples, a yellow, and a few translucent pieces.[35]

The windows are arranged to be read. The sequence starts in the north with Genesis and runs through Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses, the kings of Israel, Joshua, Judith, Job, Esther and David. The central window shows the Passion, from Christ's arrest to Pentecost. It ends in the west with the rose of the Apocalypse.[35]

Its later history is rougher than the building suggests. There were fires in 1630 and 1776 and damage during the Revolution; from 1803 to 1838 it held first flour and then archives; and it was restored between 1840 and 1863 by Félix Duban, Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Émile Boeswillwald.[34] The spire stands 75 metres above the ground.[34]

Chartres, and What a Complete Medieval Interior Looks Like

Chartres matters because so little of it is missing. Building began in 1145 and the cathedral was rebuilt over twenty-six years after a fire in 1194.[36] UNESCO describes the mid-twelfth-century west front, with its Royal Portal statue-columns, two towers, southern spire and three windows, as the complete surviving example of the art created at Saint-Denis.[36]

The glass is the reason people travel for it. Chartres has almost entirely kept a single consistent scheme of stained glass made between about 1210 and 1250, plus three twelfth-century windows above the Royal Portal and three thirteenth-century roses: the Last Judgement in the west, the Glorification of the Virgin in the north, the Glorification of Christ in the south. UNESCO calls it the greatest ensemble of stained glass from the first half of the thirteenth century.[36]

The six portals and two porches of 1210 at the north and south transepts give, in UNESCO's words, a complete panorama of Gothic sculpture at the moment it broke from Romanesque tradition.[36]

What Chartres established was then copied. The architects of Reims, Amiens and Beauvais enriched its basic design rather than replacing it, and it was imitated at Cologne, at Westminster and at León. The influence of its glass workshop reached Bourges, Sens, Le Mans, Tours, Poitiers, Rouen and Canterbury.[36]

Two changes are worth knowing about before a visit. The rood screen was demolished in the seventeenth century, and the roof burned in 1836; the metal structure put up to replace it in 1837 is itself now considered a remarkable piece of nineteenth-century engineering.[36]

The Most Famous Manuscript of the Middle Ages Was Never Used

The Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry takes its name from the description given to it in the inventory made after the death of Jean, duc de Berry, who lived from 1340 to 1416 and was the brother of King Charles V of France.[37]

Around 1411 the duke handed the decoration to three illuminators from Nijmegen who had been working for the Burgundian court: Paul, Jean and Hermann, the Limbourg brothers.[37] All three of them, and the duke, died in 1416. The book was left unfinished and unbound, and the duke never used it for his devotions.[37] He already owned about fifteen other books of hours.[37]

Other hands finished it across the fifteenth century, among them Barthélémy d'Eyck and Jean Colombe, who worked for Duke Charles I of Savoy after the manuscript passed to him around 1480. The library at Chantilly calls it a livre-cathédrale, a cathedral of a book, built by a succession of patrons rather than made once.[37]

It reached France again by purchase: Baron Felice de Margherita sold it to the duc d'Aumale at Genoa on 20 January 1856.[37] It is at the Musée Condé in Chantilly.

What the Labels Still Do Not Know

Medieval objects carry more open questions than later ones, and the good museums print them.

The Wilton Diptych, painted about 1395 to 1399 in egg tempera on oak and now at the National Gallery in London, is one of a handful of English panel paintings to survive from the Middle Ages. Its artist is catalogued as "English or French (?)" — the country has never been settled. Its documented history does not begin in the Middle Ages at all, but in 1639, in the collection of Charles I.[38]

The Soissons Diptych is traditionally said to come from the abbey of Saint-Jean-des-Vignes at Soissons, but the V&A states there is no firm documentary evidence for it. The attribution has nonetheless named an entire group of Gothic ivories.[19]

Objects were also altered by the people who rescued them. The V&A's Eltenberg Reliquary is catalogued as Cologne, about 1180, and French, 1853 to 1855, because so much of it was added in the nineteenth century, including two of its four supporting griffins. The museum now thinks it was a portable tabernacle rather than a reliquary, and that it probably came from Saint Pantaleon in Cologne rather than from Eltenberg.[39]