by Will Durant
The arts of the precious metals and stones flourished amid general poverty. The Merovingian kings had gold plate, and Charlemagne collected at Aachen a treasure of goldsmiths’ work. The Church pardonably felt that if gold and silver brightened the tables of barons and bankers, they should also be used in the service of the King of Kings. Some altars were of chased silver, some of chased gold, as in the church of St. Ambrose at Milan, and the cathedrals of Pistoia and Basel. Gold was normal for the ciborium or pyx that held the consecrated Host, for the monstrance in which it was exposed to the veneration of the faithful, for the chalice that contained the sacramental wine, and for the reliquaries in which saintly relics were preserved; these vessels were in many cases more beautifully worked than the most costly prize cups of today. In Spain the goldsmiths made resplendent tabernacles to bear the Host in processions through the streets; in Paris the goldsmith Bonnard (1212) used 1544 ounces of silver, and 60 of gold, to make a shrine for the bones of St. Genevieve. We may judge the scope of the goldsmith’s art from the seventy-nine chapters devoted to it by Theophilus. There we find that every medieval goldsmith was expected to be a Cellini—at once smelter, sculptor, enameler, jewel mounter, and inlay worker. Paris in the thirteenth century had a powerful guild of goldsmiths and jewelers; and Parisian jewel cutters had already a reputation for producing artificial gems.5 The seals that rich men used to stamp the wax on their letters or envelopes were carefully designed and carved. Every prelate had an official ring; and every real or specious gentleman flaunted at least one ring on his hands. Those who cater to human vanity seldom starve.
Cameos—small reliefs on precious material—were popular among the rich. Henry III of England had a “great cameo” valued at £ 200 ($40,000); Baldwin II brought a still more celebrated cameo from Constantinople to house it at Paris in Sainte Chapelle. Ivory was painstakingly carved throughout the Middle Ages: combs, boxes, handles, drinking horns, icons, book covers, diptychs and triptychs, episcopal staffs and croziers, reliquaries, shrines…. Astonishingly close to perfection is a thirteenth-century ivory group in the Louvre depicting the Descent from the Cross. Towards the end of that century romance and humor gained upon piety, and delicate carvings of sometimes very delicate scenes appeared on mirror cases and toilet boxes designed for ladies who could not be pious all the time.
Ivory was one of many materials used for inlay, which the Italians called intarsia (from the Latin interserere, insert), and the French termed marquetry (marquer, to mark). Wood itself might be used as an inlay in other woods: a design was chiseled into a block of wood, and other woods were pressed and glued into the design. One of the more recondite medieval arts was niello (Latin nigellus, black)—inlaying an incised metal surface with a black paste composed of silver, copper, sulphur, and lead; when the inlay hardened, the surface was filed till the silver in the mixture shone. From this technique, in the fifteenth century, Finiguerra would develop copperplate engraving.
The ceramic arts matured again out of industrial pottery as the returning Crusaders aroused Europe from the Dark Ages. Cloisonné enamel entered the West from Byzantium in the eighth century. In the twelfth a plaque representing the Last Judgment* gave an excellent example of champlevé; i.e., the spaces between the lines of the design were hollowed out into a copper ground, and the depressions were filled with enamel paste. Limoges, in France, had made enameled wares since the third century; in the twelfth it was the chief center, in the West, of champlevé and cloisonné. In the thirteenth century Moorish potters in Christian Spain coated clay vessels with an opaque tin glaze or enamel as a base for painted decoration; in the fifteenth century Italian merchants imported such wares from Spain in Major can trading ships, and called the material majolica, changing r to l in their melodious way.
The art of glass, so nearly perfected in ancient Rome, returned to Venice from Egypt and Byzantium. As early as 1024 we hear of twelve phiolarii there, whose products were so varied that the government took the industry under its protection, and voted the title “gentlemen” to glassmakers. In 1278 the glassworkers were removed to a special quarter on the island of Murano, partly for safety, partly for secrecy; strict laws were passed forbidding Venetian glassmakers to go abroad, or to reveal the esoteric techniques of their art. From that “foot of earth” the Venetians for four centuries dominated the art and industry of glass in the Western world. Enameling and gilding of glass were highly developed; Olivo de Venezia made textiles of glass; and Murano poured out glass mosaic, beads, phials, beakers, tableware, even glass mirrors, which in the thirteenth century began to replace mirrors of polished steel. France, England, and Germany also made glass in this period, but almost entirely for industrial use; the stained glass of the cathedrals was a brilliant exception.
Women have always received less credit in histories of art than they deserved. The adornment of the person and the home are precious elements in the art of life; and the work of women in dress design, interior decoration, embroidery, drapery, and tapestry has contributed more than most arts to that often unconscious pleasure which we derive from the intimate and silent presence of beautiful things. Delicate tissues deftly woven, and welcome to sight or touch, were highly prized in the Age of Faith; they clothed altars, relics, sacred vessels, priests, and men and women of high estate; and they themselves were wrapped in soft, thin paper which took from them its “tissue paper” name. In the thirteenth century France and England dethroned Constantinople as the chief producer of artistic embroidery; we hear of embroiderers’ guilds in Paris in 1258; and Matthew Paris, under the year 1246, tells how Pope Innocent IV was struck by the gold-embroidered vestments of English prelates visiting Rome, and ordered such opus anglicanum for his copes and chasubles. Some ecclesiastical garments were so heavy with jewels, gold thread, and small enamel plaques that the priest so robed could hardly walk.6 An American millionaire paid $60,000 for an ecclesiastical vestment known as the Cope of Ascoli.* The most famous of medieval embroideries was the “dalmatic of Charlemagne”; it was believed to be a product of Dalmatia, but was probably a Byzantine work of the twelfth century; it is now one of the most precious objects in the treasury of the Vatican.
In France and England embroidered hangings or tapestries took the place of paintings, especially in public buildings. Their full display was reserved for festal days; then they were hung under the arches of church bays, and in the streets, and on processional floats. Usually they were woven of wool and silk by the “tirewomen” or maids of feudal châteaux under the superintendence of the chatelaine; many were woven by nuns, some by monks. Tapestries made no pretense to rival the subtler qualities of painting; they were to be seen from some distance, and had to sacrifice nicety of line and shading to clarity of figure and brilliance and permanence of color. They commemorated an historical event or a famous legend, or cheered gloomy interiors with representations of landscapes, flowers, or the sea. Tapestries are mentioned as early as the tenth century in France, but the oldest extant full specimens hardly antedate the fourteenth. Florence in Italy, Chinchilla in Spain, Poitiers, Arras, and Lille in France, led the West in the art of tapestry and rugs. The world-renowned Bayeux tapestries were not strictly such, since their design was embroidered upon the surface instead of forming part of the weave. They derive their name from the cathedral of Bayeux that long housed them; tradition ascribed them to William the Conqueror’s Queen Matilda and the ladies of her Norman court; but ungallant scholarship prefers an anonymous origin and a later date.8 They rival the chronicles as an authority for the Norman Conquest. Upon a strip of brown linen nineteen inches wide and seventy-one yards long, sixty scenes show in procession the preparation for the invasion, the Norse vessels cleaving the Channel with high and figured prows, the wild battle of Hastings, the transfixing and death of Harold, the rout of the Anglo-Saxon troops, the triumph of blessed force. These tapestries are impressive examples of patient needlework, but they are not among the finer products of their kind. In 1803 Napoleon used them as propaganda to rouse the Frenc
h to invade England;9 but he neglected to secure the blessing of the gods.
III. PAINTING
1. Mosaic
The pictorial art in the Age of Faith took four principal forms: mosaic, miniatures, murals, and stained glass.
The mosaic art was now in its old age, but in the course of 2000 years it had learned many subtleties. To make the gold ground they loved so well, mosaicists wrapped gold leaf around glass cubes, covered the leaf with a thin film of glass to keep the gold from tarnishing, and then, to avoid surface glare, laid the gilded cubes in slightly uneven planes. The light was reflected at diverse angles from the cubes, and gave an almost living texture to the whole.
It was probably Byzantine artists who in the eleventh century covered the east apse and west wall of an old cathedral at Torcello—an island near Venice—with some of the most imposing mosaics in medieval history.10 The mosaics of St. Mark’s range over seven centuries in authorship and style. Doge Domenico Selvo commissioned the first interior mosaics in 1071, presumably using Byzantine artists; the mosaics of 1153 were still under Byzantine tutelage; not until 1450 were Italian artists predominant in the mosaic adornment of St. Mark’s. The twelfth-century Ascension mosaic of the central cupola is a summit of the art, but it has a close rival in the Joseph mosaics of the vestibule dome. The marble mosaic of the pavement has survived through 700 years the tread of human feet.
At the other end of Italy Greek and Saracen workers united to produce the mosaic masterpieces of Norman Sicily—in the Capella Palatina and Martorana of Palermo, the monastery of Monreale, the cathedral of Cefalù (1148). The wars of the papacy in the thirteenth century may have retarded art in Rome; however, resplendent mosaics were made in that period for the churches of Santa Maria Maggiore, Santa Maria in Trastevere, St. John Lateran, and St. Paul Outside the Walls. An Italian, Andrea Tafi (1213–94), designed a mosaic for the Baptistery at Florence, but it was not up to the Greek work in Venice or Sicily. Suger’s abbey at St. Denis (1150) had a magnificent mosaic floor, partly preserved in the Cluny Museum; and the pavement (c. 1268) of Westminster Abbey is an admirable mingling of mosaic shades. But the mosaic art never prospered north of the Alps; stained glass outshone it; and with the coming of Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto, murals crowded it out even in Italy.
2. Miniatures
The illumination of manuscripts with miniature paintings and decoration in liquid silver and gold and colored inks continued to be a favorite art, gratefully adapted to monastic quiet and piety. Like so many phases of medieval activity, it reached its Western apogee in the thirteenth century; never again has it been so delicate, inventive, or profuse. The stiff figures and drapes, and hard greens and reds, of the eleventh century were gradually replaced with forms of grace and tenderness in richer hues on backgrounds of blue or gold; and the Virgin conquered the miniature even as she was capturing the cathedral.
During the Dark Ages many books were destroyed; those that remained were doubly precious, and constituted, so to speak, a thin life line of civilization in their text and art.11 Psalters, gospels, sacramentaries, missals, breviaries, books of hours were cherished as the living vehicles of a divine revelation; no effort was too great for their fit adornment; one might reasonably spend a day on an initial, a week on a title page. Hartker, a monk of St. Gall, perhaps expecting the end of the world with the century, made a vow in 986 to remain within four walls the rest of his earthly life; he stayed in his tiny cell till he died fifteen years later; and there he illuminated—brightened with pictures and ornament—the Antiphonary of St. Gall.12
Perspective and modeling were now less ably practiced than in the Carolingian exuberance; the enlumineur, as the French called the miniaturist, sought depth and splendor of color, and a crowded fullness and vitality of representation, rather than the illusion of tridimensional space. Most frequently his subjects were taken from the Bible, or the apocryphal gospels, or the legends of the saints; but sometimes a herbal or a bestiary sought illustration, and he took delight in picturing real or imaginary plants and animals. Even in religious books the ecclesiastical rules for subject and treatment were less defined in the West than in the East, and the painter was allowed to range and frolic widely within his narrow room. Animal bodies with human heads, human bodies with animal heads, a monkey disguised as a monk, a monkey examining with proper medical gravity a phial of urine, a musician giving a concert by scraping together the jawbones of an ass—such were the topics that graced a Book of the Hours of the Virgin.13 Other texts, sacred as well as profane, came to life with scenes of hunting, tournament, or war; one thirteenth-century psalter included in its pictures the inside of an Italian bank. The secular world, recovering from its terror of eternity, was invading the precincts of religion itself.
English monasteries were fertile in this peaceful art. The East Anglian school produced famous psalters: one treasured by the Brussels library, another (“Ormsby”) at Oxford, a third (“St. Omer”) in the British Museum. But the finest illumination of the age was French. The psalters painted for Louis IX inaugurate a style of centered composition, and division into framed medallions, obviously taken from the stained glass of the cathedrals. The Lowlands shared in this movement; the monks of Liege and Ghent attained in their miniatures something of the warm feeling and flowing grace of the sculptures at Amiens and Reims. Spain produced the greatest single chef-d’oeuvre of thirteenth-century illumination in a book of hymns to the Virgin—Las cantigas del Rey Sabio (c. 1280)—“The Canticles of [Alfonso X] the Wise King”; its 1226 miniatures suggest the labor and loyalty that medieval books might receive. Such books, of course, were works of calligraphic as well as pictorial art. Sometimes the same artist copied or composed and wrote the text, and painted the illumination. In several manuscripts one hesitates to decide which seems more beautiful—the decoration or the text. We paid a price for print.
3. Murals
It is difficult to tell how far the miniatures, in subject and design, influenced murals, panels, icons, ceramic painting, sculptural relief, and stained glass, and how far these influenced illumination. There was among these arts a free trade in themes and styles, a continuous interaction; and sometimes the same artist practiced them all. We do injustice to art and artist alike when we separate one art too sharply from the rest, or the arts from the life of their time; reality is always more integrated than our chronicles; and the historian disintegrates for convenience’ sake the elements of a civilization whose components flowed as a united stream. We must try not to sever the artist from the cultural complex that reared and taught him, gave him traditions and topics—praised or tormented him, used him up, buried him, and—more often than not—forgot his name.
The Middle Ages, like any age of faith, discouraged individualism as insolent impiety, and bade the ego even of genius submerge itself in the work and current of its time. The Church, the state, the commune, the guild were the lasting realities; they were the artists; individuals were the hands of the group; and when the great cathedral took form its body and soul would stand for all the bodies and souls that its design and building and adornment had consecrated and consumed. So history has swallowed up nearly all the names of the men who painted the walls of medieval structures before the thirteenth century; and war, revolution, and the damp of time have almost swallowed up their work. Were the methods of the muralists to blame? They used the ancient processes of fresco and tempera—applying the colors to freshly plastered walls, or painting upon dry walls with colors made adhesive by some glutinous material. Both methods aimed at permanence, through permeation or cohesion; even so the colors tended to flake off in the course of years, so that very little remains of mural painting before the fourteenth century. Theophilus (1190) described the preparation of oil colors, but this technique lay undeveloped till the Renaissance.
The traditions of classic Roman painting were apparently snuffed out by the barbarian invasions and the ensuing centuries of poverty. When Italian mural painting revived it took its lead
not from antiquity but from the half-Greek, half-Oriental methods of Byzantium. Early in the thirteenth century we find Greek painters working in Italy—Theophanes at Venice, Apollonius at Florence, Melormus at Siena…. The earliest signed panel pictures in the Italian art of this period bear Greek names. Such men brought with them Byzantine themes and styles—symbolic figures religio-mystical, making no claim to the representation of natural attitudes and scenes.
Gradually, as wealth and taste rose in thirteenth-century Italy, and the higher rewards of art drew better talents to their quest, Italian painters—Giunta Pisano at Pisa, Lapo at Pistoia, Guido at Siena, Pietro Cavallini at Assisi and Rome—began to abandon the dreamy Byzantine manner, and to infuse their painting with the color and passion of Italy. In the church of San Domenico at Siena Guido (1271) painted a Madonna whose “pure, sweet face”14 left far behind it the frail and lifeless forms of the Byzantine painting of that age; this picture almost begins the Italian Renaissance.
A generation later Duccio di Buoninsegna (1273–1319) carried Siena to a kind of civic-esthetic frenzy with his Maestà or “Majesty” of the Virgin enthroned. The thriving citizens decided that the Divine Mother, their feudal queen, should have her picture painted on an imposing scale by the greatest artist available anywhere. They found it pleasant to choose their townsman Duccio. They promised him gold, gave him food and time, and watched every step of his work. When, after three years, it was complete (1311), and Duccio had added a touching signature—“Holy Mother of God, give Siena peace and Duccio life because he painted thee thus”—a procession of bishops, priests, monks, officials, and half the population of the city escorted the picture (fourteen feet long and seven wide) to the cathedral, amid the blare of trumpets and the ringing of bells. The work was still half Byzantine in style, aiming at religious expression rather than realistic portraiture; the Virgin’s nose was too long and straight, her eyes too somber; but the surrounding figures had grace and character; and the scenes from the life of Mary and Christ, painted on the predellas and pinnacles, had a new and vivid charm. Altogether this was the greatest painting before Giotto.*