A Companion to Medieval Art

Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe

Conrad Rudolph, Conrad Rudolph

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444357226
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte

A Companion to Medieval Art brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe.

• Brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe.
• Contains over 30 original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays by renowned and emergent scholars.
• Covers the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives.
• Features an international and ambitious range - from reception, Gregory the Great, collecting, and pilgrimage art, to gender, patronage, the marginal, spolia, and manuscript illumination.

1

Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art

Conrad Rudolph

Little Jack Horner

Sat in the corner,

Eating a Christmas pie;

He put in his thumb

And pulled out a plum,

And said, What a good boy am I!

So began for Glastonbury, as it had for countless other monasteries, the destruction of the ancient, wealthy, and powerful institution of monasticism – or, according to a different view, the defeat of an oppressor, or, according to another still, the transition of Christianity into the modern age. But it was also, in a way, the birth of medieval art historiography, a birth with a very long period of labor. When Jack (or Thomas) Horner (as the nursery rhyme is popularly and probably correctly understood to relate) rode into London from Glastonbury in 1539, three years after the Dissolution of the Monasteries had begun and one before it would end, he carried with him a gift from Abbot Richard Whiting of Glastonbury for King Henry VIII. The gift was a mince pie and, apparently having a sweet tooth, Horner, the abbot’s steward, extracted one of twelve manorial deeds (the one for Mells Manor, a real “plum,” as we still say today) hidden in the pie before delivering it in accord with the abbot’s intention of sweetening Henry’s decision regarding Glastonbury in the Dissolution process.¹ A man of prodigious appetite, Henry’s hunger was not so easily satisfied and – even before Horner had served on the jury in a sham trial that condemned the abbot, his master, to death – he consumed Glastonbury as well, perhaps the oldest and one of the wealthiest abbeys in England. Among the last monasteries to hold out during the Dissolution – a great pilgrimage place with legendary associations with the beginnings of Christianity in the British Isles, Joseph of Arimathaea, St Patrick, King Arthur, and Dunstan – Glastonbury’s riches were plundered, its lands sold, and its great buildings demolished. (Little Jack Horner’s descendants still live in the manor at Mells.) In all, 577 religious houses were suppressed by Henry – 200 of them great institutions with substantial holdings – their buildings torn down, their artworks destroyed, and their libraries dispersed.² With this, one of the great cultural institutions of Britain ceased to exist.

Around the same time, the medieval patrimony of Northern and Central Europe suffered irreparably from a series of wars, uprisings, and acts of iconoclasm that took place following the momentous posting of Luther’s 95 theses at Wittenberg in 1517. And in France, the Wars of Religion (1562–98) were virtually unrivalled in their destruction of the French artistic inheritance.

The breadth and finality of this destruction would bring about a sense of loss that combined with a number of other vital factors such as incipient antiquarianism, the early development of national identity, and a general spread of education that would lead, eventually, to the formation of the field of medieval art history as we have it today. This field, however, can be a multifaceted one, and the times since the Reformation have been no less complex than those in which the very first “medievalists” worked. In the hope that the chapters in this book might be better understood by those readers unfamiliar with the general history of the writing of medieval art history, this introduction will attempt to give a brief overview of this history, a basic narrative, to explain, as best it can, how we got here from there.

The Pre-History of Medieval Art Historiography

Already in the midst of the wreckage that followed in the wake of the Reformation, the first steps were taken to preserve from total loss the vestiges, both documentary and physical, of a rapidly disappearing culture, a culture seen as both compelling and threatening, even at the same time. This spontaneous and erratic rescue arose first in Britain and only later elsewhere in Western Europe, originally always the result of individuals operating on their own initiative, whatever their professional positions and institutional support may have been. But, in a sense, the historiography of medieval art began long before its writing, and the rescue of medieval culture’s remains in the formation and continuation of the authority of Classical art. This was an authority so overwhelming that it acted as an almost insurmountable barrier to an acceptance of the standards of medieval artistic culture in general and of the aesthetic basis of medieval art in particular. It was also an authority that had a long and venerable ancestry in the historiography of Western art.

Not long after what is now called the Late Classical period, the first known history of Greek art was written by Xenocrates (fl. 280 BC), a history that is believed to have taken as its basic theme the systematic progress toward the perfection of naturalistic or illusionistic rendering through the solving of formal problems by a succession of famous artists. Xenocrates’ writing has not survived, nor have those of his contemporaries, such as Douris of Samos (c.340–260 BC), who is thought to have put the history of art that he wrote into the form of a series of biographies. However, both Xenocrates and Douris, among others, were heavily used by Pliny the Elder in his great Natural History (71–7 AD). Pliny continued the concept found in their work of a clear trajectory of phases of broad stylistic development from initial formation to perfection, and from perfection to decline, this perfection being seen as reaching its high point in the High and Late Classical periods. He also generally followed the biographical format, which was a very popular one. Unlike most of the other early writings on art, Pliny’s did survive and served as an enormously influential model in the first centuries of early modern art historical writing. In no small part because of this, from the very beginning of early modern art history and for more than two hundred years to come, the standards by which art was judged were those of naturalism, and the format in which the history of art was presented was typically that of the biography. Or, put another way, the paradigm of art historical writing was that of the historically known individual advancing the naturalistic and illusionistic standards of the Classical period. Equally as critical for the historiography of medieval art was the stylistic developmental model of initial formation, naturalistic perfection, and eventual decline. From the very beginning, the deck was stacked against the art of the Middle Ages with a standard that was generally foreign to medieval culture, which, for much of its history, privileged the abstract and the iconic over the naturalistic and illusionistic; and which saw the role of the artist as that of a craftsman, irredeemably below those individuals within medieval culture – saints, great ecclesiastics, and the most important nobles – who were thought of as worthy of having their lives and deeds recorded.

The changes that the naturalistic and biographical paradigms underwent in the beginning of early modern art historical writing were, for the purposes of this introduction, moderate. But the stylistic developmental model of initial formation, perfection, and decline was to be reconceived in a way that Pliny and his contemporaries could never have imagined at the height of the Roman Empire. In the mid fourteenth century, with Petrarch, an awareness arose in Italian humanist circles not only of the decline of civilization that accompanied the fall of Rome, which had never been in question, but also of a Classical (that is, “Roman”) cultural revival in their own time. Petrarch referred to the decline as a time of “darkness,” a time of almost unrelieved ignorance – this first articulation of the idea of “the Dark Ages” being, clearly, a negative one (1337–8).³ Soon, Boccaccio (1348–53) and others applied this concept to the history of art, although in an unsystematic way, most notably in regard to Giotto (1267/75–1337). It was only a matter of time before historians such as Flavio Biondo came to see the interval between the Empire and their own time as a distinct period (posthumous 1483), something Biondo’s contemporaries and immediate followers gradually formalized with terms such as media tempestas (1469), media aetas (1518), and media tempora (1531). (The actual term medium aevum, the direct Latin of “the Middle Age” or “the Middle Ages” as the source of the word “medieval,” is first found at least by 1604; with the English equivalent appearing immediately afterwards with “the Middle Age” being used by William Camden in 1605 and “the Middle Ages” by Henry Spelman in 1616.⁴) By the early fifteenth century, Niccolò Machiavelli presented a flexible cyclical theory of history (posthumous 1531), largely based on the work of the Greek historian of ancient Rome, Polybius.⁵

In regard to the historiography of medieval art, these developments took their definitive form in the work of Giorgio Vasari, considered by some to be the founder of modern art history. There had been earlier writings on the history of art from Italian humanist circles, including by the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti (begun c.1447), but Vasari’s Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori (1550; rev. edn. 1568) is regarded as the first modern history of art because of its broader, more synthetic, and more critical nature. Following the authority of Pliny, Vasari presents a history of (largely Italian) art employing a standard of naturalistic progress and a format based on biographies of the artists. On the one hand, his emphasis on technical knowledge and aesthetic judgment gave an enormous impetus to the practice of connoisseurship with its estimation of quality and the determination of attribution that was to dominate art historical discourse for so long. On the other, the biographical format, encouraged by the Italian humanist affinity for the individual, opened the biographical paradigm to the new topos of the artist as genius. (This realm of genius was apparently open only to practitioners of painting, sculpture, and architecture; Vasari is considered to be the source of the distinction between the so-called major and minor arts, a distinction that every period potentially faces but that is particularly disadvantageous to the medieval, whose book painting was considered a “minor art” until the late nineteenth century.) At the same time, in also employing a variation of Pliny’s stylistic developmental model of initial formation, perfection, and decline, Vasari was forced to address something Pliny never was: the millennium and a half of artistic activity since Pliny’s death in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.

If Pliny could interpret a few hundred years of what he saw as an artistic decline in his own time simply as the result of an essentially moral decline, Vasari was compelled to explain more than a thousand years of what he saw as an artistic decline of morally superior Christian culture with reference to both the Classical period and his own time – as well as in light of recent developments in the Italian humanist view of history. He did this by accounting for artistic decline in general not in moral terms but by conceiving of the pattern of artistic change as a biological cycle (birth, growth, old age, and death) superimposed on the history of the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Thus, the periods of initial formation and naturalistic perfection of the Classical world were followed by that of the decline of the arts of the Middle Ages (begun before the fall but fully realized through the destruction and culture of the Germanic invaders); the cycle then beginning again around the time of Giotto and others who strove toward the ideal of naturalistic perfection with a new sequence of initial formation, increasing perfection, and, finally, perfection itself (embodied in the work of Michelangelo). Vasari describes this process of the re-establishment of naturalistic standards as a “rebirth” (rinascita), our “Renaissance” – a concept that not only recognizes a self-conscious view toward the present and future, but also signals a consciousness of a break with the Classical past, any sense of continuity irrevocably ruptured by the Middle Ages. In an attempt to account for major artistic change as something more than technical advances, Vasari attributes this change to “the very air of Italy,” a very unphilosophical and conceptually unrelated predecessor of Hegel’s Zeitgeist and Riegl’s Kunstwollen, mentioned below. Vasari is, perhaps, most notoriously known among medievalists for his characterization of what is now called Gothic architecture as an invention of the Goths (or Germans), who “filled all Italy with these damnable buildings”; the reference to the Goths – including through the use of the adjective – being one that had been made by other writers earlier (and by Vasari himself) to indicate a much broader variety of forms of medieval architecture with which Italian humanists were out of sympathy.⁶ But his great importance for the historiography of medieval art lies in the fact that his work was so enormously influential throughout Europe that it gave the impression there was only one methodology, only one way of looking at art. This was a way that, in the emulation of Vasari’s own particular naturalistic and biographical paradigms and cyclical model of stylistic development, removed art from its cultural context and relegated medieval art to the low point of Western culture for more than two hundred years to come.

The Reformation and its Aftermath

What was to Vasari only too ubiquitous, Gothic, was – in the broader sense of medieval culture – to many others now in danger of being lost. Since the mandate of this volume is Romanesque and Gothic art and architecture in Northern Europe, let’s return to England of the Dissolution to look at John Leland, the person who is generally described not as the first medieval art historian, but as the first modern English antiquary.

In 1527, after eighteen years of marriage without a male heir to the throne, Henry VIII began a series of efforts aimed at having his marriage with Catherine of Aragon annulled and his association with Anne Boleyn legitimized. Unable to achieve this end after seven years of contesting the issue (including a great deal of public pressure on the Church in England), he broke with Rome in 1534, and began preparations for the Dissolution of the Monasteries mentioned at the opening of this introduction in that same year. The “visitations” began in 1535 and the monasteries were incrementally suppressed from the weakest to the strongest from February 1536 to March 1540. (In the end, the monasteries lasted longer than Anne, the second of the king’s six wives, who was beheaded in May 1536.) It was in the midst of this gradually escalating state of affairs, from 1534 to 1543, that John Leland undertook a project with the king’s support to research the libraries of all the monasteries and colleges of England, so that “the monuments of auncient writers as welle of other nations, as of this yowr owne province mighte be brought owte of deadely darkenes to lyvely lighte” (the latter possibly being a reference to Petrarch). Leland, who had been in Holy Orders and had been appointed Henry’s librarian around 1530, was an antiquarian (antiquarianism being a form of the study of the past that is based on physical as well as literary remains, typically with an aim toward classification rather than a comprehensive historical view). His antiquarian proposal, however, seems to have received an urgent impetus from the Dissolution, of which he approved but whose destruction of the ancient libraries he deeply regretted (even as he contributed to it himself in his acquisition of books for the king’s library). In the end, this already daunting project expanded its goals to include everything from libraries to inscriptions, important buildings, artistic remains, coins, and geography, in both England and Wales. The result is considered to be a significant innovation in antiquarian method, even if an uncritical one.⁷ Far less a study of art and architecture than it was a broad review of the topography and antiquities of the kingdom, Leland’s project remained unfinished when he was declared insane in 1547 at the age of around 44, dying five years later. His extensive notes, however, were widely known to the next generation of antiquaries who used them, cited them, and even indexed them. These were finally published in nine volumes from 1710 to 1712 as the Itinerary; further notes were published in six volumes in 1715 as the Collectanea. Some scholars believe that Leland’s insanity was the result of distress at the equivocal role he played in the destruction of his beloved libraries. However this may be, what is not in doubt is that the impetus for this seminal work was Leland’s strong sense of nationalism, and that its purpose was to contribute to an awakening of English national identity.

This sense of nationalism and of a need for a more clearly defined national identity in the face of an irrevocably changing world was a common factor in much of the work (from both sides of the aisle) on British antiquities and topography that followed Leland. It was a time of first beginnings, and the progress – however much erudition and initiative was involved – gives, in historiographical retrospect, something of the impression of intellectually feeling around in the dark. Two scholars who emerge most strongly from this challenging period before the English Civil War were William Camden and Robert Bruce Cotton. Camden built upon Leland’s manuscript notes to produce what Leland never managed: a comprehensive and coherent antiquarian study of England, and one that was extremely popular (1607). Cotton was a great antiquarian and collector who is known to every medieval art historian from the cataloguing of his famous manuscript collection according to the Classical busts, particularly of Roman emperors, that stood on top of the bookcases that housed the manuscripts. (Cotton also bought and moved the room in which Mary, Queen of Scots, had been executed at Fotheringay Castle to his own house at Connington, perhaps the first “period room.”) A vital part of the great activity of this formative era was the creation of a number of modern institutions, if only in their nascent forms. Cotton’s collection, which was actively used by contemporaries in the manner of a modern research library, would later become an important part of the manuscript collection of the British Library. Together, Camden and Cotton were part of the founding of the Society of Antiquaries in 1586, an important institution in the encouragement and dissemination of scholarship at this time of early development (dissolved in 1614 but to be re-established).

But there were also a number of other scholars who, if less well known than Camden and Cotton, contributed perhaps more directly to the foundation of an art historical base of methodologies, terminology, and periodization. For example, William Somner wrote on a number of medieval churches, including the Cathedral of Canterbury, distinguishing between Romanesque and Gothic elements (though not using these terms) and trying to use architectural form as a means of dating (1640), a method that was to have a long history. It is from this time that we have the first recorded use of the term “Gothic” in English: in 1641 as an adjective and in 1644 as a noun, although it is not clear from the passages whether the author, John Evelyn, was using the word specifically in the sense that we understand it today or more gene...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Blackwell Companions to Art History
• Title Page
• Copyright
• List of Illustrations
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface
• 1: Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art
• 2: Vision
• 3: Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers
• 4: Narrative
• 5: Formalism
• 6: Gender and Medieval Art
• 7: Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe during the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
• 8: Art and Exegesis
• 9: Whodunnit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art
• 10: Collecting (and Display)
• 11: The Concept of Spolia
• 12: The Monstrous
• 13: Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture
• 14: Romanesque Architecture
• 15: Romanesque Sculpture in Northern Europe
• 16: Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture
• 17: The Historiography of Romanesque Manuscript Illumination
• 18: The Study of Gothic Architecture
• 19: Gothic Sculpture from 1150 to 1250
• 20: Gothic Manuscript Illustration: The Case of France
• 21: Glazing Medieval Buildings
• 22: Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts
• 23: East Meets West: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States
• 24: Gothic in the East: Western Architecture in Byzantine Lands
• 25: Architectural Layout: Design, Structure, and Construction in Northern Europe
• 26: Sculptural Programs
• 27: Cistercian Architecture
• 28: Art and Pilgrimage: Mapping the Way
• 29: “The Scattered Limbs of the Giant”: Recollecting Medieval Architectural Revivals
• 30: The Modern Medieval Museum
• Index