A Companion to Medieval Art

Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe

Conrad Rudolph, Dana Arnold

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781119077749
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Art

A fully updated and comprehensive companion to Romanesque and Gothic art history

This definitive reference brings together cutting-edge scholarship devoted to the Romanesque and Gothic traditions in Northern Europe and provides a clear analytical survey of what is happening in this major area of Western art history. The volume comprises original theoretical, historical, and historiographic essays written by renowned and emergent scholars who discuss the vibrancy of medieval art from both thematic and sub-disciplinary perspectives.

Part of the Blackwell Companions to Art History, A Companion to Medieval Art, Second Edition features an international and ambitious range of contributions covering reception, formalism, Gregory the Great, pilgrimage art, gender, patronage, marginalized images, the concept of spolia, manuscript illumination, stained glass, Cistercian architecture, art of the crusader states, and more.

• Newly revised edition of a highly successful companion, including 11 new articles
• Comprehensive coverage ranging from vision, materiality, and the artist through to architecture, sculpture, and painting
• Contains full-color illustrations throughout, plus notes on the book's many distinguished contributors

A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe, Second Edition is an exciting and varied study that provides essential reading for students and teachers of Medieval art.

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 Ninety‐Five Theses at Wittenberg in 1517. And in France, the Wars of Religion (1562–1598) were virtually unrivaled 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 before 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 BCE), 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 BCE), 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 (71–77 CE). 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 (1337–1338).³ Soon, Boccaccio (1348–1353) 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 (early) 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 precedent 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: ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editor's Preface
• Preface to the First Edition
• Preface to the Second Edition
• 1 Introduction: A Sense of Loss: An Overview of the Historiography of Romanesque and Gothic Art
• 2 Artifex and Opifex – The Medieval Artist
• 3 Vision
• 4 Materials, Materia, “Materiality”
• 5 Reception of Images by Medieval Viewers
• 6 Narrative, Narratology, and Meaning
• 7 Formalism
• 8 Gender and Medieval Art
• 9 Gregory the Great and Image Theory in Northern Europe During the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
• 10 Iconography
• 11 Art and Exegesis
• 12 Whodunnit? Patronage, the Canon, and the Problematics of Agency in Romanesque and Gothic Art
• 13 Collecting (and Display)
• 14 The Concept of Spolia
• 15 The Monstrous
• 16 Making Sense of Marginalized Images in Manuscripts and Religious Architecture
• 17 Definitions and Explanations of the Romanesque Style in Architecture from the 1960s to the Present Day
• 18 Romanesque Sculpture in Northern Europe
• 19 Modern Origins of Romanesque Sculpture
• 20 The Historiography of Romanesque Manuscript Illumination
• 21 The Study of Gothic Architecture
• 22 France, Germany, and the Historiography of Gothic Sculpture
• 23 Gothic Manuscript Illustration: The Case of France
• 24 “‘Specially English’: Gothic Illumination c.1190 to the Early Fourteenth Century”
• 25 From Institutional to Private and from Latin to the Vernacular: German Manuscript Illumination in the Thirteenth Century
• 26 Glazing Medieval Buildings
• 27 Toward a Historiography of the Sumptuous Arts
• 28 Reliquaries
• 29 East Meets West: The Art and Architecture of the Crusader States
• 30 Gothic in the Latin East
• 31 Art and Liturgy in the Middle Ages
• 32 Architectural Layout: Design, Structure, and Construction in Northern Europe
• 33 Sculptural Programs
• 34 The Art and Architecture of Female Monasticism
• 35 Cistercian Architecture
• 36 Art and Pilgrimage: Mapping the Way
• 37 “The Scattered Limbs of the Giant”: Recollecting Medieval Architectural Revivals
• 38 Medieval Art Collections
• 39 The Modern Medieval Museum
• Index
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