Episode #88: Art Fact and Fiction: Were the Middle Ages an Artistic Wasteland? (S10E05)
In our tenth season, we’re going at art history with a skeptical eye and a myth-busting attitude to uncover the fictions and facts about some of our favorite artists. We’re starting our season today with this controversial subject: were the Middle Ages an Artistic Wasteland?
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Episode Transcript
When someone says the words “the Middle Ages,” what’s the first thing you think about? Perhaps it’s the word dark. Dark, meaning not like there wasn’t sunshine, or that things were unbearably awful, though both of those were, naturally, true at various stages of this nearly 1,000-year span of history. But dark—as in “the Dark Ages,” a time where nothing flourished from a cultural or artistic standpoint. All the great works and innovations from ancient Rome—poof, gone—replaced by strangely and crudely painted or sculpted figures. It’s a common question that’s still lobbed about quite frequently: why is medieval Art so bad? In fact, when you type the words “Why is medieval art…” into Google, as I did as an experiment, you’ll find that the words “so bad” actually auto-fill first as a suggestion for your search. So: a lot of people have this question. It’s all over YouTube, Quora, Reddit, and elsewhere, and in 2019, The Guardian newspaper in the U.K. posted this as an online question from a reader, hoping that other reads would chime in with their own answers and theories. Because, yeah, on the surface, works made in the Dark Ages don’t look so amazing. But could that all be a lie, or just bad PR?
Some people think that visual art is dry, boring, lifeless. But the stories behind those paintings, sculptures, drawings and photographs are weirder, more outrageous, or more fun than you can imagine. In this season, season 10, in which we’re going to dig deep on some great art historical facts--and fictions. In this episode, we’re challenging that old chestnut about the medieval period: were the Middle Ages in Europe an artistic and cultural wasteland? This is the ArtCurious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in Art History. I'm Jennifer Dasal.
I admit that I made it out of my undergraduate studies in art history without taking any courses on medieval art. And I also confess that I don’t remember us looking at a lot of examples of medieval art in my art history surveys, other than the occasional icon of the Virgin and Child, or mainly to highlight some important architectural monuments from that era. So it wasn’t until I was in my first year of graduate school that I took courses specializing in this often-neglected area of art—and not even just neglected, but misunderstood, too. The class was after lunchtime and, to be fair, I did occasionally get a little bit sleepy, sitting there in the warm, darkened classroom in the middle of the afternoon, but what I learned was that medieval art is fascinating. It is colorful, golden, glittering. It’s thoughtful. It’s religious. It’s daring. And it was a hot source of debate even in its own time. But naturally I didn’t know all of this until later. What I thought going into my art history courses was that the Middle Ages were those “Dark Ages” we mentioned at the top of the show.
Before we debunk the whole “the Middle Ages were artistically lacking” myth, we’ve got to first establish why and how this idea took hold. And we have an example of a highly public thinker who might be responsible for this misguided idea. In the 1330s—a period that many consider to be a bridge between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in Western Europe—one of the most famous writers in Italy and beyond was Petrarch, a poet and scholar whose opinion was that, in the nearly thousand-year gap between the fall of the Roman empire in 476 C.E. and Petrarch’s own enlightened time- everything sucked. And it stems back to Petrarch’s personal adulation of all things ancient Greco-Roman. Take, for example, ancient Greek sculptures like the so-called Artemision Bronze, a figure that’s probably representing Zeus or Poseidon, now in the collection of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, or the Capitoline Venus from Rome’s Capitoline Museum, which showcase these Greco-Roman god and goddess as gorgeous ideals of human beauty, symmetry, strength and grace. They are, in an anatomical and perhaps mathematical sense, perfect. And at the dawning of the Renaissance, it was these kinds of sculptures that made Petrarch swoon. And he wasn’t alone in this swooning, of course. If you were part of my course on women artists of Renaissance Europe from Avid.fm-and it’s never too late to join this evergreen class, so definitely sign up at avid.fm/Jennifer to get the goods—then you already know that one of the big things about the Renaissance was this renewed interest in everything from ancient Greece and Rome. After the fall of the Roman empire, then, everything changed, and in Petrarch’s eyes, artworks no longer had what he referred to as the “light of classical learning,” which had flourished until that point. That classical learning was purportedly “rediscovered”—and I’m definitely using air quotes here-- at the dawn of the Renaissance, leading to a fantastic rebirth—that’s what Renaissance literally translates to—in Greco-Roman artistic styles, ideas, literature, and so much more. Before that rebirth, though? Petrarch was certain that things were awful. Just terrible. To be fair, Petrarch was, probably, a little smug about the greatness of his own era, but he contrasted his time so greatly with that of the medieval period that it is he who seems to have first coined the term “the Dark Ages.” And really, even the phrase “Middle Ages” isn’t necessarily a friendly one, assuming that that interim period between antiquity and the Renaissance was just that—a long period of waiting, an infertile way point between two otherwise incredible time periods. It’s kind of insulting. And it is very untrue.
Now, to progress today, I must make a couple other things clear. First is that we are referring to medieval art as a period in Europe, but especially a period in Western Europe, so we’re focusing today on the kind of works created mostly in Italy, France, and other Western European countries. At the same time, though, there’s a lot of overlap between the Western European Middle Ages-slash-medieval period and the Byzantine Era, which bled into the west during the 1200-year-rule of the Byzantine Empire, which, at its height, stretched from the Middle East, across Greece, to cover most of modern-day Italy, and circled along the eastern and southern Mediterranean Sea to include a large expanse of northern Africa. So we’re actually going to cover a little bit of each, even though there are some solid differences between them—too many, in fact, to get into in just one episode, so please holla at me on social media or through our website to let me know if you’re clamoring for some Byzantine goodness. Overall, though, today’s discussion will help us to understand the wealth and breadth of amazing art and architecture that was created during this non-dark age.
Okay, now that that’s been cleared up, we’ve got to talk about Christianity, because the point at which the religion gained a significant foothold in Europe coincided with the fall of the Roman empire. And much—though not all—of medieval art reflects this spread and continual growth of this juggernaut of a faith system. Christianity, prior to the early 4th century C.E., had been outlawed during the Roman empire, which preferred a polytheistic belief system that predicated the worship of multiple gods and goddesses. After it was legalized in the Roman empire in 313, it spread so quickly that it became the state religion only a few decades later, in 380. And the visual arts needed to keep in step with the changing times—in short, it needed to innovate. So gone were all those super-idealized images of Mars and Venus—the gods, not the planets-- or of the emperors in the guise of Jupiter or other deities, so that the Roman emperors could effectively be worshiped, or at least compared favorably, to gods, too. Instead, these pagan artworks needed to be replaced by works of art that helped explain the main gist of Judeo-Christian thought—which was no small feat. How can you describe so much in a single visual space or a specific physical location, especially for a huge swath of people to whom the entire religion was entirely brand-new? And to complicate matters, what about the fact that many of these same people were illiterate, unable to read, or at least read well?
The answer was something of a throwback—a system that had been in use for thousands of years and was truly one of the earliest ways of creating art back in the Neolithic period: to rely on simplified forms and symbols. Think back to all those cave paintings and simple “Venus” sculptures that we discussed in last’s seasons spate of “A Little Curious”—the earliest artists boiled down both animal and human forms to the bare necessities. And the same works here for medieval artists. Ain’t nobody got time to spare on making an ultra-realistic, highly detailed scene when all of a sudden, you’ve got to explain a lot of things: who is God the father? Who is Jesus, and what’s His story? What the heck is a Holy Spirit, and what are the Ten Commandments? When you think about it, even with the growth of Christianity during this time, it was still potentially an overwhelming ask, and a lot of buy-in would have been required of devotees. So artists made the whole business easier by boiling everything down to its basics, with symbols developed to quickly share the most pertinent details. A number of these symbols were developed in secret catacombs and hiding places that were established in Rome by early Christians before their religion’s legalization, and many are images that we still use today: the fish to represent Jesus, the Cross to represent Christianity or Christian thought in general, and so forth. But most importantly, they wanted to share the stories of Jesus’s life and teachings in a clear and understandable way, so narrative paintings—images that strove to tell a story—really became necessary. Everything got boiled down to its essentials, kind of like how in a comic strip you might see that only a few scribbles or lines are brought together to illustrate a person’s face. And this, right here, is what Petrarch, and many others, used as a means of criticizing medieval art, calling it “bad” in comparison to ancient and Renaissance standards. Remember that during those periods, having a super-intensely-lifelike rendition of the human body—but a perfect and idealized one, let’s not forget—that was the ultimate goal. Not so here. Artists simply changed their modes of working to be able to better work for their audiences, and thus, their new patrons: the Christian church itself and its newly-converted supplicants.
Coming up next, we’re talking icons and their use in medieval art… but then what happens when your artwork is questioned as a false idol. Stay tuned, right after this quick break from today’s sponsors.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
After the Roman empire split into two—with the western portion of the empire centered in Rome, and the eastern one, based in Constantinople, now Istanbul in modern-day Turkey--the need to have visual representation of God, after centuries of doing so with Pagan traditions, still held strong, and thus the Icon—sacred images representing holy figures—became central to European art. These icons not only showed Jesus, and/or God the father, but also the Virgin Mary and other important saints and holy figures. Today, when we think of icons, we probably mostly picture painted wooden panels, but in the medieval era, icons could be crafted from all kinds of materials and came in all sizes and shapes: so, you’d have icons carved out of marble and ivory, presented in fresco and mosaics, woven into tapestries, and even carved into gemstones and made of precious metals. These icons became so hugely popular—and thus prominent as works of art—because not only did the works of art provide a focal point for prayer and contemplation while attending church, but smaller, hand-held ones—sometimes worn as pendants or necklaces—enabled personal use, too. Essentially, believers could take their god and saints with them, and use the icon as a reminder to pray at will. And surely this helped with the spread of Christianity, too, if everyone has their own little icon to hold onto. There are many wonderful examples of these throughout the world, but I love this tiny little cameo now located at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, just barely over an inch tall, made of a soft stone that has been carved to present us with the face of Jesus. It’s been so worn down that you can just imagine how this tiny little icon could have been pocketed and rubbed with a thumb, over and over, worried down so that you can’t hardly see Christ’s nose anymore. It was an artwork made as a tool of worship, one that could have been taken anywhere and everywhere.
As the first few centuries of the medieval era, a hiccup arose—a big hiccup. Though the visualization of God—any god—in art had long been a tradition for thousands of years, Christian theologians began to push back on this concept after interpreting one of the Ten Commandments as relating specifically to artworks. In the Old Testament of the Bible, in Exodus, chapter 20, verse 4, it reads, quote: “God expressly forbade the Israelites from making any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” Unquote. Now, there’s long been a debate about these lines, and they’ve been up to interpretation since, well, since they were apparently handed down to Moses and the Israelites at Mount Sinai. But during the Middle Ages, theologians began wondering if this stricture didn’t just refer to avoiding the worship of any other spiritual being, but any visual representation of any spiritual being—including God himself. You might see the problem here: all those icons and narratives about God and Jesus suddenly looked bad, sinful, and people got confused as to whether they were worshiping God, or a picture of God, which would be considered a so-called “false idol.” And this is where we see a huge spate of iconoclasm, especially in the 8th and 9th centuries C.E. Iconoclasm, translating to “image breaking” in ancient Greek, was a movement in which icons—or indeed, any kind of visual rendition of God-- were destroyed because of a concern that devotees were venerating the image of God instead of God itself. This goes a long way to explaining why we don’t have a glut of objects remaining from the early medieval and Byzantine periods in art history—a lot of it was simply destroyed. The good news is that iconoclasm simmered down by the middle of the 9th century and heading into the 10th century C.E., and there was a resurgence of the icon and of representation of God, Jesus, and other revered figures in a bodily form in art. Old habits die hard, as the saying goes, and truly, art was just too important to the continual growth and understanding of Christianity. But just as art had to change and innovate to meet its needs during the earliest years of the medieval era, so it had to change, too, as we reach the Mid-Byzantine and the so-called Carolingian period of Western European Art. And that’s coming up next, right after this little break. Come right back.
Welcome back to ArtCurious.
Here we are: iconoclasm is sort of in the rear-view mirror, but fears about eternal damnation from accidentally worshiping an icon is still palpable. If you’re a craftsman or an artist, then, what were you going to do to solve this dilemma? Artists got around it by avoiding one thing: realism. If you’ve ever seen a medieval icon, you know right off the bat that the figure of Christ, or the Virgin Mary, or whomever, that is shown therein is flat, its features almost geometric in their simplification—because yes, thousands of years before the dawn of the 20th century, artists were already toying with abstraction. There’s no shading, no depth, and in many ways, they seem almost like they are only a few steps up from being stick figures (okay, they are better than that, but still). And this was intentional. Very intentional. By not appearing realistic in any way, there would be less risk of someone feeling like they were worshiping a real spiritual figure—because remember, there was a long history of modeling gods and goddesses off the human body, so visualizing the Christian god as an old white dude? That was still necessary at this point. But when your image of God is almost cartoon-like in its rejection of the illusion of depth and space, it’s easier for our minds to think, Oh, right! This isn’t really God, it’s a stand-in for God! This simplification is what Petrarch got wrong. He took it as an error, a lack of knowledge of perspective and of classical artistic training and technique when it was actually an innovation to avoid connotations of idolatry. Take, for example, a fresco of Christ formerly in the church of Sant Climent de Taüll by the so-called Master of Taüll—an image of this is posted on the blog post for this episode. In this image, called, in medieval image, a Christ Panokrator, a specific representation of Jesus as the Almighty. Dressed in blue robes and sporting some pretty hefty eyebrows, this Jesus looks not a lot like your typical ancient Roman guy, just walking down the street, but he has more in common with a comic strip—all bold lines, flattened space, and basic rendition of the simplest and most necessary of body parts.
Not that all imagery in medieval painting was all flat, though. In private commissions in particular, artists had more freedom, and so were able to model the human form however they’d like. And of course, there was sculpture, too, which required, in many cases, the need or ability to show a figure on all sides, or, if in a relief sculpture, at least in some depth. Sometimes all you have to do is look at the robe of a stone saint on a cathedral’s exterior to see how its pleats evoke the just-so precision of a Roman toga, or the way a man’s knee might be angled to break through the flatness of a carved scene. Medieval artists were looking at classical art—and by classical, I mean ancient Rome and Greece—for some inspiration and foundation for their own works.
And speaking of classical art, it was still very much appreciated and celebrated during these so-called “Dark Ages.” The study of literature and documents from ancient Rome and Greece did not stop during the medieval period. Think now of illuminated manuscripts—those gorgeous jewel-toned texts surrounded by illustrations and decorative borders. When we think of illuminated manuscripts, many of us—and I’m including myself here—automatically think of religious texts: Bible passages or prayer books meticulously copied by Catholic nuns and monks. But the learned religious folk didn’t just keep busy with religious tracts, but also preserving centuries’ worth of knowledge about science, anatomy, philosophy, and so much more, much of it stemming from the ancient world. Many of these documents were stored away in libraries and manuscript archives to preserve this knowledge, but just because it wasn’t used daily by the farmer down the road doesn’t mean that this interest, this passion for the ancient past, had disappeared. Truly, the reason that we have the works by people like Virgil and Cicero today—and really, most of the great works of the ancient Latin language—have survived because they were meticulously studied and preserved during this period.
And yet there was more innovation that sometimes gets forgotten or misremembered. In the Middle Ages, for the first time in centuries, learning and education was taken seriously—so seriously, in fact, that it was during this time period that the first universities in the world were established, such as the University of Bologna, which opened in 1088, or Oxford University, which was established by no later than 1167, though some documents suggest that teaching at a broad level had begun there as early as 1096. New ideas were being discussed and disseminated at a breakneck pace, amazing works of world literature were produced, things that we still read and interpret today, like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Dante’s Divine Comedy. There were also significant innovations in the world of architecture, with the late medieval period bringing forth Gothic cathedrals like Chartres and Notre Dame, and incredible Byzantine structures, like the famed Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. It was an incredibly rich period in European history, one that grows even richer when we understand the context and current events that affected the creation of works of art in this period. I just wish that Petrarch had understood a little bit more of that context, realizing that the flatness that he had despised as weak artistic skills was a thoughtful consideration and a deliberate tweaking of tradition. And after all, isn’t that what we see over and over again in art history? Generations of artists reacting to the generations before? That same kind of responsiveness would affect the Italian Renaissance, too, that golden era that Petrarch and others so plainly extolled for its idealism and adherence to perfection. If you’re a fan of Mannerism, a kind of sub-category of the High Renaissance, or the late period of the Renaissance, then this might make some sense. Mannerist artworks, like Parmigianino’s famed Madonna with the Long Neck, today in the Uffizi in Florence, isn’t idealized at all—our Madonna’s neck curves outward, seeming to contain one or two more vertebrae than anatomically possible. Perspective and space are super distorted and weird. The whole thing, in short, is just wonky: and what better way to break away from tradition than to do something weird and different. And weird and wonderfully different are awesome words to describe medieval art.
Speaking of weird, coming up next time on the ArtCurious podcast, we’re throwing it back to one of the earliest episodes of our show—with updates!—to ask a big question about an artist we’ve already discussed this season: is a famed Renaissance painter actually super bad at painting women? That’s in two weeks: don’t miss it.
Thank you for listening to the ArtCurious Podcast. This episode was written, produced, and narrated by me, Jennifer Dasal. HUGE thanks to Bryn Robbins for her awesome research help. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at alexdavismusic.com, and our logo is by Dave Rainey at daveraineydesign.com. Our podcast services are provided by our friends at Kaboonki. Subscribe now to their show, Subgenre, a podcast about the movies. Season 1 is available in its entirety now—please visit subgenrepodcast.com for more details. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com.
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Check back with us soon as we explore the facts, and the fictions, of the unexpected, slightly odd, and strangely wonderful in art history.
