If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog that needs updating. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts and reflections on reality and knowledge have menu pages above.
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Posts have been less frequent than we'd like of late. It's nothing to be concerned about - just life getting in the way - and something that we hope to improve on. Organizing the Band is also taking more time - our path has fragmented as we deal with different issues and we need to make sure it'll comes together. Unfortunately, this means we've wasted time starting more than one post only to abandon it part way.
The path has two related parts - one more immediate, one more general. The immediate one is to understand what happened to art in the West
Francis Picabia, The Procession, Seville, 1912, oil on canvas, 121.9 × 121.9 cm, National Gallery of Art, Washington
We chose the Armory Show of 1913 as a target because it's the event most associated with the coming of Modern art to America. Trash like this was held up as avant-garde. It's now in the National freaking Gallery.
The Band believes that this wasn't organic. Monied globalist interests were already working to destroy Western cultures. Our art institutions were going to be hollowed out and inverted - the question was the form it would take
Modernism and the Armory Show - all the fake theory and history - were little more than cover story for a culture war that people couldn't see. But cover stories also have value and this one raised a bunch of other questions. Namely, cover story or not, how does art get inverted to the point where this is thinkable even as an avant-garde move.
So the broader path is to use the art to consider cultural attitudes and overall health. To try to "see" the bigger picture - the inversion of Western life - through it.
Paul Gauguin, Words of the Devil, 1892, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington
It isn't all utterly talentless. Syphilitic pedophile Gauguin is technically better than a toddler when documenting his Third World sexcapades. But logos - beauty, truth, culture - are all replaced by formal self-reflection. Doesn't matter if the syphilitic pedophile is a mediocre painter and morally putrescent. He's pushing fake modernist essentialism - undermining realism and illusion for reminders that this is just color on a flat surface. Modernism will deny art the ability to represent anything other than its own physical nature.
He is also desconstructing Western aesthetic canons or something. The title at least is accurate.
It all seemed clear enough, until we realized that we needed to define art. This turned out to be not so clear. Looking into the available source material shows art to be a ridiculous concept historically. It either wasn't defined at all or was made up of inane arbitrary musings from a parade of intellectual flyweights posing as rules . What these have in common is the desire to try and set up a high-prestige category of visual images that are different from pictures in general. The recurring failure is trying to find a natural, absolute definition for this group.
The failure is inevitable. "Art" is self-evidently arbitrary. It's a man-made word. A sign. An arbitrary mark or noise associated with a man-made cultural category. There's no more an ontologically objective and absolute definition of "art" than there is for "lower middle class". These aren't the same:
Adriaen van Ostade, The Painter in his Studio, 1663, oil on oak panel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden
Joseph Beuys, The End of the Twentieth Century, 1983-1985, Tate Gallery, London
You can describe what different concepts of art are as socio-cultural designations, but there is no all-time philosophical rule that decides what the terms are. They depend.
It was necessary to write a post on language and meaning to explain the thinking behind our search for a Western notion of art. Once you get the relationship between semiotic and ontological subjectivities, you see that language will always be blurry and context-dependent.
The point of this painting...
Anonymous, Italo-Flemish, Portrait of a Gentleman beside a Framed Portrait of a Lady, 17th century, oil on canvas, private collection
The entire purpose of this is to record and transmit information. To reference. Who these people were and what they looked like. The strong relationship between them. And then all the secondary markers of class and social position. Even the paper or envelope on the table would have some meaning.
Realism - meaning simulating the visual experience of the real world - is important to this. But it's also an illusion. Remember that looking realistic doesn't change that this is a fiction made up by a painter and his client.
... is the opposite of this one:
Max Ernst, Young man Crossing a River Taking a Girl by the Hand and Jostling Another, 1927, oil on canvas, private collection
In theory, Surrealism was about exploring the unconscious - that is, pure subjectivity. The opposite of recording objective information. In reality, it explored the pathological psyches of the de-moralized pervs and freaks that were somehow appointed the "modern art scene".
Wait... we know how it happened. The pervs and freaks were perfect tools for monied globalist elites to use to invert and hollow out culture.
Call it weaponized mental illness. Globalism in all its forms loves the humiliation ritual as a flex. To enemies and sycophants alike. Transforming a cultural space for beauty and truth into a playground for debasement, ugliness, and insanity is more than just an assault on the West. It's mockery too. Like ridiculing and trash-talking someone the whole time you publicly beat their ass. And anyone who wants to be on the scene has to genuflect to this.
Every time any critic, teacher, historian, artist, whoever, prattles on about the "importance" of Ernst, Dada, or Surrealism, they ritually reenact the mocking disembowelment of a cornerstone of Western culture.
It is like a ritual. One that plays out in museums, books and articles, classrooms, all over the internet - wherever "art" is fraudulently defined for people who don't know any better.
Like this homage to Dada at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The MOMA is one of the epicenters of the excrescence of Modernism in American culture.
You can see that is was a well-organized subversive movement. The trash was accompanied by a barrage of pamphlets, magazines, and other publications shown in the center.
At the bottom - some of Duchamp's "ready-mades". Ordinary objects that magically become "art" by entering a museum. Duchamp showed the hand - the system will decide what Art! is with absolute power. Even a urinal can be transmogrified. And no one seemed to notice.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude (Study), Sad Young Man on a Train, 1911-1912, oil on cardboard mounted on Masonite, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice
Coming full circle, Duchamp was exhibited at the Armory Show - in his pre-Dada Cubist phase. Duchamp would later pose as the absurdist trickster, but was more of an intelligent sociopathic opportunist.
See the inversion? Both his pose and his personality are opposite to the historical meaning of an artist in the West.
Getting back to painting and the what words mean post - Modernism inverted the relationship between the word and the meaning. We have two paintings that fit completely different definitions of "art". If we consider what they are - where they fit in their larger socio-cultural context - you would not put them in the same category or class of object.
These are opposite in function, values, and place in the cultural landscape. Conceptually, they are utterly different.
Modernism prioritizes the word "art" over the collection of things it refers to. But there is no definition of art that can accommodate both of these beyond what they are made of. Since "painting" is what the "art" shares, the definition of this art is painting. Ergo, the essence of art is paint on a flat surface.
Back in reality, there is no universal cultural assumption called "art". It's historically contingent. And painting is an activity - a techne - that can be applied to all kinds of standards and purposes. They are both paintings. But by Western standards, they are not both "art".
What is art? as an absolute objective category is the wrong question.
Charles Kuwasseg, Canal Scene with Ships against a City Backdrop, 1873, oil on canvas, private collection
The right question is what is the art of the West?
And what is the art of the West brought us to our Greek-derived terms and a completely different picture than the globalist lies. Art as an attitude and process, not some timeless thing existing outside its context. Culturally-specific technical skills manifesting Logos in material form.
This gives art a purpose - expressing and sharing the history and values of a people. We can keep general and consider the three pillars of Western civilization, but it subdivides down to regional flavors.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Virgil Reading from the Aeneid, 1864, oil on canvas, private collection
Pillar 1, the Classical Tradition was a centerpiece of Western art and culture from the late Middle Ages until Modernity
Luc-Olivier Merson, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 1880, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Pillar Two, Christianity was a centerpiece of Western art and culture until Modernity
Anders Askevold, Fjord Landscape with Figures, 1889, oil on canvas, private collection
Pillar Three, the European nations were centerpieces of Western art and culture until Modernity
The purpose of the art of the West - giving material form to truth, beauty, and logos - is exactly the thing that Modernism attacked. It makes a twisted sort of sense. Art was a critical vector of cultural identity, continuity, and renewal. For centuries it spoke in one way or another to who we are. "Autonomy" - the mentally crippled idea that the only subject for art is art stole this from us. To the point where is is staggering how many people know nothing of this heritage. Or even worse, think of art as something perverse, sissified, a scam, and/or otherwise garbage.
This was deliberate. It's also why we had to go back to the roots and retrace the thread that was broken.
Helen Allingham, Thatched Cottage, West Horsley, Surrey, 19th century, watercolor, private collection
Even something as basic and homey as a country cottage encodes a world of information about culture and identity. Attitudes towards likestyle, family, natural beauty, and responsibility. A sense of topography, climate, and flora. An image of not just where, but who these people are.
Art gives form to logos through technical skill. This makes it a cultural vector. Which is why it wasn't enough to replace it - 19th century beauty had to be eviscerated, humiliated, mocked as cloying, maudlin, retardaire, and excluded from the histories. We're bringing it back. There's an real art of the West history still to be written.
If art is contingent and culturally-specific, deriving a theory of art in the West is insufficient. We had to look at how this really played out in actual history - it's the history and not theory that establishes precedents and sets paths for the future. And this meant thinking about the society that produced the art of the West.
One thing that jumped out is that art and social class are closely linked.
Balthasar van den Bossche, Elegant figures Overseeing Sculptors Working on a Statue of Hercules and Anateus in a Palace Courtyard, 1709, oil on canvas, private collection
Not a surprise, since art is expensive, and the more popular art is in a society, the more competition drives up the cost of top artists. But it is worth noting that they are inextricably linked from inception. Art develops alongside socio-political power. Not some fake Marxist or Foucauldian secular transcendence of "power" as a replacement for metaphysics, but power in the sense of wealth and resource control. The biggest producer of early medieval art is the Church, with the aristocrats - royals and nobles - taking over as Modernity nears. They will be shouldered out in turn by the financial global elite with some crossing over.
We observed some seeds of modern corruption early on. Before you can invert secular and sacred you need to confuse the difference - otherwise the inversion is too sudden. Medieval art showed us Church and aristocracy growing closer together. Not in a healthy symbiotic way, but in by confusing the Biblical distinction between what is God's and what is Caesar's.
Juan Pablo Salinas, A Toast to the Cardinal, early 20th century, oil on canvas, private collection
It was easy for art to blur these boundaries, because it is also a horizontal filter like the kind we looked at in the last post. Meaning art is like language - a material system of representation that the represents the whole vertical ontology in the same terms. If Gothic architecture is used to indicate Christian foundations, there is nothing to stop secular aristocrats from using it to associate themselves with God. The two are radically different, but because the representational methods are the same, it is easy to conflate them.
Master Barthomeu, Royal tombs, Pere III and Constance of Sicily (front) and Jaume II and Blanche of Anjou (back), 1290s, marble, Cistercian convent, Santes Creus, Tarragona, Spain
This isn't Postmodern idiocy where the same signs mean the secular and sacred are the same. This is the reality that different things can use the same signs to trick people into connecting them in their minds.
So it's important also to show what art was historically. What was the Gothic? How does it fit with the West? What happened to it? Because misrepresentations of the Middle Ages ground more modern art theory - the Middle Ages are still being misrepresented to pretend Modernity isn't an inverted moral cesspool.
And where are we going? The rest of this post will continue the Gothic art overview with a look at painting. Then a more speculative look at the difference between a visual art and language. Then an occult post on Hermes Trismegistus and a post on the end of the Middle Ages in Italy. These will all stand on their own, but will all also light up different dimensions of this transition into Modernity.
Hans Michael Therkildsen, The Critic in the Artist's Studio, late 19th century, oil on canvas, private studio
Modernity involves tightening the walls around "art" as a cultural activity. Clients negotiating with picture-makers is replaced with increasingly powerful gatekeepers defining what is acceptable as art. Modernity also depends on centralization - the more centrally restricted and regulated a field, the easier it is to control and subvert. One reason why we've made a big deal about the medievals not having our concept of art is to show that an art scene or world is not needed to express logos with techne. It's actually a net negative - squelching innovation, competition, and breadth.
Now for Gothic painting
It's manuscript illumination mainly, because what we think of as paintings and murals weren't as important as other arts in the Gothic period (roughly 1150-1350). This changes bigly in Italy, but that's a tale for later. Romanesque churches had wall painting - most of which is lost. But Gothic interiors didn't have the fresco and other kinds of paintings that you see on walls in Italian churches. In the cathedrals, most of the wall art was stained glass and in large halls and other spaces, tapestry was more prestigious. Relief sculpture was popular as well.
The problem with assessing Romanesque and earlier medieval painting is that so little exists. Between iconoclasm, neglect, dampness and other deterioration, and changing tastes, its nearly all gone. The frescos at St. George in Reichenau (below) are the only extent cycle from before 1000 north of the Alps and they are in poor condition.
Palatine Chapel, 792-805, Aachen
Charlemagne's palace chapel is the oldest real high-end Germanic building surviving. The mosaic decoration isn't original, but is in the same place as the first frescos and mosaics. The chapel was based on early Christian models, so the same kind of decoration was used.
Large wall surfaces = lots of room for pictures. For the late Romans and their Mediterranean offshoots - Byzantines and the early Mohammedan Caliphate - this meant golden mosaic. They all also used the luxury materials as decoration as well. Note the colored stones and marble paneling between and around the arches and columns.
Church of Saint George, late 9th century, Reichenau, Germany
The pre-Romanesque or proto-Romanesque basilica-type churches that followed were heavily painted. This is the material that is almost entirely gone today. Even St. George is missing its paint in several areas, but there is enough to give a sense.
This continues into the Romanesque - Saint-Savin (below left) being a unique surviving painted barrel vault. But compare that with the choir of Saint-Denis (below right). In the Gothic building, the pictures are all done in stained glass. It's in Italy where late medieval wall painting is a major art, not north of the Alps.
Abbey Church of Saint-Savin-sur-Gartempe, begun mid-11th century, Vienne, France
For most of the Middle Ages, small-scale panel paintings were not much of a factor. Painting wasn't an important art to the Germanic tribes that moved into the Western Empire and it took a long time for it to catch on. Their art tended to be multi-colored and multi-media, combining bright gems and precious metals.
Front cover of a Gospel book, around 895, St. Gallen Abbey Library, Cod. Sang. 53
This cover from the end of the Carolingian era looks like a painting - it's a rectangular picture in a frame. But the picture is carved ivory, not painting and the frame is part of the cover. And you can see two artistic traditions. The colored gems precious metals with abstract designs are typical of Germanic Frankish art. The carved ivory is either Byzantine or Byzantine-inspired. There's even text - "Christ is enthroned here, surrounded by the wreath of virtues".
Book Cover with Ivory Figures, late 11th century, gilt silver, glass & stone cabochons, cloisonné enamel, ivory on pine support from Aragon, Spain, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Three centuries later, a similar arrangement with most stones missing. When manuscript painting starts to get more complex, figures from works like this are influential.
We're generalizing, but what we think of as painting in modern terms didn't exist coming into the Gothic era. The idea of "painting" as a specific category with rules first appears in late medieval Italy. We have pictures or images in different materials - mosaics, stained glass, murals, relief sculpture on architecture and small works like book covers, etc.
Compare the types of figures, poses, the way the scenes are set up, even the abstract borders from these carved door panels and a stained glass window made about 85 years apart.
Panels from a medieval German door, 1065, painted wood, St. Maria im Kapitol, Cologne; Moses and the Burning Bush, Romanesque German stained glass from around 1150, Westfälisches Landesmuseum, Münster
Influences came from different places, and which were applied where depended on what was available. Byzantium and classical legacy for the most part.
The Madonna as Advocate (Haghiosoritissa), 1150s, tempera on panel covered with canvas, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
Medieval Italian panel painting based on Byzantine prototypes. We will look into Italian art in a later post because it is where the modern notion of art is born. For now this will do as an example of a kind of art that wasn't really a factor north of the Alps.
The piece is very Byzantine in style and technique. You can see the echo of classicism in the handling of the face, but it's become more formula than likeness. There isn't really a sense of place either. Icons are proxies for their subjects, but realism was way less important than symbolism.
Here's the thing about Byzantine influence.- it has to be taken in context. Talking about "realism" in a modern way isn't possible without something like a modern concept of "art". Realism implies a comparative judgment with a requisite frame of reference. More or less real than... This implies that
a) art is evaluated by how closely it conforms to material reality
b) some art is rated closer to reality than others
The Germanic and Celtic cultures of post-Classical Europe had minimal traditions of depicting figures. What little we have is schematic to the point of abstraction. So the Middle Ages built a picture-making tradition from the ground up.
In this context, the icon was influential just as a type of figure-painting as a concept. How "real" it looked wasn't a consideration at first, but like we saw with sculpture in the last post, this changes. But there are differences between how paintings and sculptures get more "real".
Limbourg Brothers, The Annunciation from the Belles Heures of Jean of France, Duke of Berry, 1405-1409, ink, tempera, and gold leaf on vellum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Sculpture gets more realistic by looking more and more like a real person.
Painting gets more realistic by looking more and more like looking out a window at a real world.
Figure of Christ, 13th century, Cologne Cathedral choir
Style isn't realistic. It's style. A way of making things look. This crosses media - the same stylistic tendencies apply to statues that look more like people and pictures that look like windows.
When you notice things from the same time or place have a similar look, you're talking style.
Understanding how Gothic painting develops means being attentive to representation and style. Realism is an associative thing - the increasing sense that pictures should resemble the appearance of the material world. Style is an "artistic" thing - a filter between the picture and the appearance of the material world. It's all based on communication - what changes is how and what is being communicated.
We also have to remember that these aren't changes between movements in nonsense modern discourse. Romanesque to Gothic != Post-Impressionism to Cubism. There was no concept of art movements, styles, or scenes in the Middle Ages. Part of the Romanesque is imagery becoming widespread in Europe for the first time since Roman times. It is emerging more than changing. We can think of the Gothic as the maturing of what the Romanesque started - really the first maturing of a European art movement.
Master Hugo, Moses teaches the Law of Unclean Beasts, 1130-1135, from Deuteronomy, Bury Bible, Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 002I, f.16
The Romanesque Master Hugo is one of the first known lay (non-monastic) manuscript painters and the earliest recorded professional artist in England. Click here for a look at his Bury Bible and here for a scan of the whole book.
His vivid colors and Byzantine-style textile folds indicate he traveled - to Italy and probably Byzantium. This was new to England, but it was less a style change than the start of style as a professional artistic concern.
Note how flat the scenes are. There is really no sense of space. Just really nice linework and color.
This is why we're looking at Gothic painting now - painting isn't that big of a deal in the Middle Ages, but it becomes the preeminent art form on the road to modernity. And the misrepresentation of medieval art and culture is a huge part of Western art "theory". Starting with the actual history skips the atavistic nonsense and lets us see how the very idea of what a picture is came into being. How something like a design becomes an imaginary "space" with similar laws of physics to our own world. And how this coexists with style-consciousness.
This happens mainly in manuscripts - Italian-style panel paintings start to appear in the later Middle Ages. So we'll look at manuscript illumination.
The opening of St Luke's Gospel in the Lindisfarne Gospels, between 710 and 721, ink, pigments and gold on vellum, British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV, f.139r
The same skill set - manual dexterity and a steady hand - were needed for both.
St. Matthew from the Lindisfarne Gospels, between 710 and 721, ink, pigments and gold on vellum, British Library Cotton MS Nero D.IV, f. 25v
The figure types have roots in Roman antiquity, but filtered through Germanic - mainly Anglo-Saxon - channels. But look how flat and linear the picture is. There are really no coherent spatial relations. It is exactly the same use of detailed lines and patches of color as the abstract decoration and text.
The angel was Matthew's traditional symbol. The onlooker behind the curtain has the witness function - he confirms Matthew's account is true.
Conversion, Healing and Preaching of Saint Paul, around 840, illumination on parchment from the First Bible of Charles the Bald, Saint-Martin Abbey workshop in Tours, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Latin 1, f.386v
Charlemagne's imperial scriptorum kicks off the idea of royal patronage. These are more complex pictorial arrangements with multi-figure stories in bigger landscapes. The style is much closer to that of early Christian Roman or Byzantine interpretations of classical painting.
Charlemagne was trying to civilize his people in a Roman manner, including adapting what he saw as Roman art. Again - not a style change because there was no Frankish tradition of painting figural stories. It's the birth of a new kind of art.
Master Hugo, Christ in Majesty, 1130-1135, initial letter 'E' from Ezechiel, Bury Bible, Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS 002I, f.33v
And by the Romanesque 11th century, professional artists have begun to appear, bringing us to the Gothic.
Even though there was no "art" in modern terms, the Band thinks of these medieval painters as artists. They applied techne - skilled craft to express phronesis - truth and beauty through logos. But they weren't treated the way the modern world treats "artists" - no famous names, gallery and museum shows, tolerance of socio-pathology because "genius", etc. Their activity was regulated and protected - whether within monastic life for the earlier monks or craft guilds for the pros. They were skilled craftsmen or artisans.
Glancing over the history, it seems that there is no one developmental chain for medieval painting. This is because there is no distinct notion of "art" as a basket concept to bring the different aspects of picture-making together. Different times, places, and media had different formative influences.
The evolution of panel painting is strongly influenced by Byzantine icons. Manuscript painting is closely linked to writing at the beginning. Practical models for picture making in the appropriate context, not theoretical nonsense about fake universality.
Suddenly the pattern gets clearer - without nonsense modern fictions of art and autonomy, the nature and meaning of pictures is culturally determined. It depends on function since images are always made for a reason or reasons. Individual creators have input but different situations have different requirements and use pictures for different things.
The picture-maker is between art and craft. He produces an object that requires manual techne and communicates symbolically. Pictures represent things - they are semiotic filters like we discussed in the last post. We can reconfigure the graphic to show it
This is important to the health of the arts of the West. Being able to represent like an author was always the argument for the intellectual status of the artist - he trafficked in ideas and emotions like a philosopher or poet. Now consider that Modern retardation about "autonomy" rejected the exact thing - representation - that gave artists intellectual credibility. If art can't reference or depict anything, than only the system men - critics and gatekeepers - speak for "art". Enter Art!
What complicates things is that artworks and languages are different kinds of sign. We'll do an upcoming speculative post on pictures vs. words as sign types - it's another subject that has been buried under millions of de-moralized pages of myopic materialist. It's also really broad in its own right - Byzantine icons to contemporary memes. So for now we'll keep it simple.
Go back to Peirce for a moment. His model isn't perfect, but it covers the main parts of how meaning is made and it's a familiar starting point.
He describes three kinds of signs - symbols are arbitrary, icons are based on visual resemblance, and indices are causal - not arbitrary or imitative. Peirce would call written language symbolic and paintings iconic. But don't put too much weight on his terms - what matters is the idea that signs have observable categorical differences.
The last point in the picture text above is important. Don't get hung up on Peirce's terms - he gives words his own meanings as is obvious when you compare his versions to the standard definitions. The whole point of thinking about words and what they mean is to recognize that they are just signs. They aren't the things that they describe. A lot of the failure of the modern world comes from reversing the importance of sign and reference. Pretending that words and their arbitrary definitions come before the reality that they were made up to refer to.
It's everywhere - consider our out-of-control legalism where linguistic permutations replace the intended purpose of statutes. Sham intellectual circles where Philosopher's Names replace observation and logic. Media illusions where fake stories replace actual events. What is said replaces what was done. If we modify our sign graphic, it looks like this:
It doesn't matter "what Peirce said" or that "Peirce calls an arbitrary sign a symbol". Peirce is an observer and thinker who reasoned out something about signs. What matters to us is the usefulness of what he reasoned out - that signs are divisible into distinct categories, and whether his divisions are consistent with patterns in reality.
His icon and symbol describe different process of association. One is completely arbitrary and conventional and the other physically looks like the subject in some way. There is an intrinsic connection based on resemblance of some kind. This isn't a perfectly clear-cut distinction. All pictures are conventionalized to some extent. Theorists love overstating the real-world applicability of categorical differences. Unfortunately for them, material reality is blurry and doesn't fall into the neat schematic categories found in abstract reasoning. Think of physical resemblance and arbitrary convention as tendencies that aren't mutually exclusive and they get more useful.
Juan Gris, La Conferencia, 1908, gouache on paper, private collection.
Thinking of tendencies or directions instead of absolute categorical distinctions is more accurate. All pictures use culturally-determined conventions. The question is whether something communicates more like an alphabetic code or a simulated visual experience. Or some mix of the two like a meme or illuminated manuscript.
Or a caricature. Even distorted cartoon images are signs that represent with shapes that resemble the subject in an exaggerated way. With repetition, one bit of a caricature can stand for the whole subject like a pictogram. Think of the outline of Trump's hair. Tendencies.
This way of thinking - taking the symbolic or pictorial as directions or tendencies - applies to the idea of realism in medieval art. If we refer to something as more "realistic", what we are saying is that it's doing a better job of visually simulating the experience of real things. It is relying more on pictorial, resemblance-based semiotics - Peirce's icon - and less on purely arbitrary symbolic ones. Remember - no matter how "realistic" an image NEVER stops being a constructed message. But that construct can change from between more or less symbolic or pictorial in how it structures its message.
Christ Enthroned, around 800, ink, pigments and gold on vellum, from the Book of Kells, f.32v, Trinity College, Dublin
Go back to the early medieval illuminations that were extensions of the scribe's pen. We can see them as a turn from a symbolic to a pictorial orientation in the same medium of pen and ink.
The figures are Classically inspired because Germanic and Celtic tribes didn't have this sort of art tradition - Roman art provided the idea to make art with figures. But as we see from the Book of Kells, written three-quarters of a century after the Linsidfarne Gospels, illuminators weren't bound to classical style. The flowing lines of the figure resemble the flowing abstract decoration and text. But it communicates by resemblance to bodies and faces.
Classical influences are hard to pin down in the Middle Ages because they are there, but not systematic. Manuscripts from Charlemagne's imperial scriptoria can look almost a Classical revival at times because they were deliberately copying Roman and Byzantine models. The illuminator of the Book of Kells had little contact and/or interest in Classical examples beyond the general Roman idea of adding pictures to a book. The Romanesque art that preceded the Gothic was a mix of local innovations and Classical hold-overs without much orientation towards accurately simulating the visible world.
Generalizing, Romanesque art does use a figural vocabulary that signifies by resemblance. You identify the forms as people so their gestures, expressions, and objects convey meaning. But the pictures are also very symbolic and stylized compared to a realistic image or photo. Romanesque manuscript illuminations are generally very flat and linear - clear lines on the page like letters without any impression of imaginary depth or place. Consider this 12th century manuscript from the Scriptorium of the Abbey of Saint-Amand:
St. Amand Dictates his Will to St. Baudémont and St. Mummole and St. Réole Witness, from the 2nd Vie de saint Amand, around 1153, illumination on parchment, Bibliothèque municipale de Valenciennes, MS.501, f.58v-59r
Note how the figures are just suspended against an indeterminate blue background. There isn't even a ground plane to stand in. Even their bodies are flat and linear - there are no light and shadow effects or perspectival distortions that would indicate 3D forms. We are not intended to interpret this as a simulation of real-world appearances, but as more symbolic sources of information. So long as you can recognize the figures and their positions, what they are doing, and why it is important, the image is successful.
The brightly colored forms stand out from the text and catch your attention. When you look at them and determine what they mean, their message is delivered.
Local saints vouch for the authenticity of the text. That is the central point that this picture conveys. Witnessing and saintly authority are the things that have to come across. Whether the saints resemble real people or occupy a nice landscape are irrelevant.
Stay with the same monastic Scriptorium of Saint-Amand and move forward a few decades and you can see the move towards a more realist orientation. The pictures are still flat and linear but the figures are more interactive and there are some attempts at landscape setting. In the lower scene, there are rudimentary indications of a town and water.
Information is still transmitted by the gestures and accouterments of symbolic figures, but now the painter is at least thinking about where these happen.
St. Amand is made a Bishop and Delivers a Servant Possessed by a Demon, from the 3rd Vie de saint Amand, around 1175, illumination on parchment, Bibliothèque municipale de Valenciennes, Ms.500, f.57r
More complicated figure group on the top and at least an awareness that space exists down below.
To see the transition into the early Gothic, look at this page from a Parisian manuscript from around the turn of the 13th century. It is still linear, but the pictures have become much more ambitious. The narratives are more complex and the figures more varied and dynamic. There is also greater depth contributing to a sense of coherent setting. People are superimposed over each other and some are set in simple landscapes amid hills and plants. You wouldn't call it photorealistic, but the realism is relative to the Romanesque paintings above.
It's a tendency.
David and Goliath, 1180-1200, illumination on parchment from the Bible de Souvigny, Bibliothèque municipale de Moulins, Paris, Ms.1, f.93r
The style and organization of the pictures indicates that the inspiration for this new, more natural attitude was Byzantine. There are different paths - the influence could come either through the Norman conquest of Sicily in the 11th century or direct from Constantinople. And Byzantine art derived from Classical origins. What it does here is give the early Gothic painters fresh ideas about telling visual stories. In a way that tightens the connection between painting as a medium and the appearance of the real world.
The Mosan metalwork that we saw in the Gothic sculpture post also had an influence on the direction of manuscript painting.
Nicholas of Verdun, The Verdun Altar, from 1181, Klosterneuburg Monastery, Austria
The altar is a masterpiece of metalwork and enamel. It's a triptych, meaning that it has two side doors like wings that can open or close, and the whole thing is covered in little Biblical scenes. It is incredibly ornate - goldsmithing at the highest level.
See the difference from the Modern notion of the art of painting. This is the medieval taste for expensive materials and different media combined in spectacular objects. But there are pictures and they were influential.
The Mosan metalwork is even more linear than copying statues. They're flat, colors are limited and color effects are limited by the material - gold with inlaid enamel.
It's like a manuscript for how it combines types of signs. There are words, pictures - stories and individual figures, things that look architectural, abstract designs all done in the same media. Here the picture shows the Pascal Lamb visually and the text does it symbolically. The overall spectacularness shows the importance.
Thinking of realism - the building is impossibly small, but the lamb does appear to go into it. As if it opens into a real depth.
The Verdun Altar was very influential. The new qualities in the sculpture at Reims Cathedral that we saw in the Gothic sculpture post seems to have come from these metal scenes. And Gothic manuscripts from around 1200 show the influence in the design of the figures and decoration and in the intense solid colors. This Psalter or Psalm Book was a French Royal commission that is an important marker of artistic change.
The Annunciation to the Shepherds and The Presentation in the Temple, from the Ingeborg Psalter, around 1195-1200, Musée Condé MS. 9, Chantilly
The Ingeborg Psalter, made for a French queen, is a great example. Note the postures of the figures and especially how the folds of the garments are done.
The Tree of Jesse, from the Ingeborg Psalter, around 1195-1200, Musée Condé MS. 9, Chantilly
Not all photos do justice to the art. Here's one that really captures the metallic quality of the Ingeborg Psalter. The resemblance to the Verdun Altar is uncanny.
Note that the royal example is a Psalter and not an entire Bible, or even set of Gospels. This reflects a massive change in the nature of "art" at the beginning of the Gothic period. Manuscript painting in the earlier Middle Ages was mainly monastic. Remember Master Hugo the lay professional was a novelty in the early 12th century. Monastic scribes and illuminators produced big ritual volumes for abbeys and other churches and gifts to royalty. Over the following century, art production became aristocratic.
Over the 13th century, the Paris of the Gothic Cathedrals became a cultural hub. The University of Paris was the intellectual leader of Europe, King St. Louis (1226-70) and his court were major patrons of the arts, commercial art workshops for private buyers were flourishing, and monasteries became less and less significant as centers of book illumination. In his new context, smaller scale books were preferable. Prayer books like Books of Hours, Breviaries, and Psalters are where Gothic innovations in painting take place.
Psalter of St. Louis, 1223-1270, Bibliothèque Nationale MS. lat. 10525, Paris
This is the most extravagant of the early Gothic French Psalters. It has almost 80 full page miniatures showing scenes from the Old Testament.
The figures have a sinuous gracefulness and the gold backgrounds add an air of luxury. You can also see the illusion of space with the patterned floor that they stand on.
Each page also has Gothic architectural details that look like St. Louis' awesome Sainte-Chapelle that we've looked at in a lot of posts. See the wall along the top of this panel with the buttresses and pinnacles. This is on all the pages/
It isn't just sculpture and architecture that influence the evolution of the Gothic manuscript - stained glass was a dazzling new kind of imagery that also had an impact on painters. The area and weight of the leaded glass in the big cathedral windows needed additional support, so metal frames were set into the stone walls for strength. Sometimes these could be simple grids, but a large number of patterns appear. Here are a few early 13th-century lancet windows from Chartres with different supporting lattices taken from this website.
The glass artists used the supporting frameworks as natural dividing lines to break the window into different scenes - like panels in a comic book. The configuration didn't really matter - any shape could take on a few figures and the repetitive quality of the pattern made all of them sequential.
The same visual effect turns up in early Gothic manuscripts. This is purely an aesthetic influence - the metal lattices in the windows were structurally necessary for support and the painted lines in a manuscript aren't.
Creation scenes from the Wenceslaus Psalter, about 1250–1260, tempera colors, gold leaf, and ink on parchment, from Paris, J. Paul Getty Museum MS. LUDWIG VIII 4, fol.7v
The division into geometric panels and the saturated colors are coming straight out of the new Gothic windows. Even the way the gold leaf background is applied in a way so the reflection seems like light shining through.
Can you see what's happening? We are seeing Western culture change its attitude towards imagery. The Gothic isn't just a new style compared to the Romanesque and earlier Medieval periods. It's the beginning of the mainstreaming of images in general in the post-Classical West. And it moves in step with socio-cultural change. Urbanization, economic and population growth, and the rise of ruling aristocracies began moving the arts from the sacred to the secular world. Subject matter was still Christian, but the clients were rich nobles and the painters increasingly professional craftsmen. This is the art market in embryonic form - monastic illumination transformed into luxury collectible.
Scenes from Genesis, from a Bible moralisée, 1220s, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Codex Vindobonensis 2554, Vienna
The soaring architecture and stained glass windows and the new developments in painting and sculpture are all part of this rising importance of the visual arts. Professional manuscript illuminators were developing what was pretty much a new art form - aristocratic painted books - for a new clientele. It is natural that they would turn to other art forms for inspiration.
Like stained glass. A Bible moralisée was a series of allegorical glosses on scripture - the window pattern was perfect for organizing all the little scenes.
For the bibliophiles, this manuscript has been published in a beautiful facsimile edition. Click for the link and more pictures.
The frontispiece with God as a geometer creating the universe is a picture that's appeared in earlier posts. The compass was the architect's tool in the Middle Ages and represented logos in creation. God is like an architect creating the universe according to a rational plan.
The rest of the book is pages and pages of elaborate illuminations arranges to make moral connections. It's like a series of stained glass windows but with more thematic order.
This new culture of imagery is important for a historiographic reason as well. Academic historians tend to define the emergence of something like the modern concept of art theoretically. "Art" begins when we find historical sources sources discussing it in a theoretically conscious way. Traditionally in the Italian Renaissance. But the secularization and commercialization of Gothic painting shows us that the socio-economic foundations of the modern art world were laid before the theoretical ones. The theorists writing about art were trying to codify something that had evolved organically - art as an economically-quantifiable part of an emerging elite (relatively) secular culture.
All the deceivers in the will over reality crowd - humanists, communists, Postmodernists, satanists, etc. - invert this. They all claim that their babble - from magic words to materialist teleology - will determine what will happen. This is moronic. Theory is a rational inference from the observation of what's already happened. It's a conclusion. If it's a good one it will be predictive of future events. Ans since we're setting up the road into modernity, here's an observation that's a piece of that puzzle too. The path to the modern idea of art starts in the Gothic.
By the end of the thirteenth century, we start to see clear artistic personalities forming - painters with recognizable styles that distinguish their work. Market forces apply to art in a particular way. It's a competitive market, meaning there will be winners and losers performance-wise. But the product isn't functional in an ordinary way - it's not like a leaky barrel or brittle knife where the craftsman's quality is physically tested. The competition is aesthetic. Artist success depends on being the best painter, but that depends on what customers are drawn to. And customers are conditioned to want what they've already seen. So the media push-pull of pleasing and leading customers starts here too.
Circle of Nicolaas Verkolje, A Lady Making an Offering to Cupid at Night, early 18th century, oil on canvas, private collection.
Taste is always cultural so styles of beauty change over history. But when you look back at old pictures, you can usually get what they were going for. 'Given they thought X, you can see why this was popular' sort of stuff. You don't have to like classicism to appreciate that classical logos and beauty are there.
Modernity is uniquely inverted for attacking beauty outright. The banality and ugliness of Modernism is different from having to having to take different cultural preferences into account.
It is the difference between logos filtered through material culture and anti-logos.
Modernity is different because client desires changed. Modern art was a weapon in the hands of dyscivic global elites to destroy the culture of the West. The producers of that ugly crap were giving the customer what they wanted. Gothic buyers liked elegant designs, luxurious colors and materials, and pictures that brought more and more realism to their stylized beauty. In a competitive market, the successful painter is the one who can deliver, and an individual style stands out from the crowd.
Master Honoré is one of the first artists that we can recognize as a clear personality.
Master Honoré, The Dormition of the Virgin from a Book of Hours from around 1290, Stadtbibliothek, Nuremberg
A page of Master Honoré's work. He was very influential - especially his decorative borders with their leaves and plants, animals, and tiny figures.
Some of his inspiration was English, but his influence was tremendous in France.
Master Honoré, David Anointed by Samuel and David and Goliath, f.7v. of the Breviary of Philippe le Bel, from Paris, 1296, Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris
His figures are typical for their linear Gothic elegance, but he's introduced a big element of realism - light.
Note how the figures aren't colored in solid stained glass-type patches. Instead the areas that would be sticking furthest out are lighter and those further back darker - like the was real light and shade work on objects. Variations of lighting suggest things that protrude and cast shadows. And that means thinking of the picture as something other than flat decorative lines. You can see it in the picture above this one too.
When artists represent the way light falls on a 3D form, they are conceiving the picture more as the simulation of the visual appearance of reality than as surface decoration or arbitrary sign. It's obviously very conventionalized, but remember that out categories are tendencies. And this is tending towards the less symbolic and more pictorial.
Realism.
This has gotten crazy long. We're at a good stopping point, because with Master Honoré and the rise of the recognizable artist, we need to consider what's going on in Italy. Italy was culturally very distinct from Gothic Europe and had been going through an artistic revolution too - in panel painting.
Giotto, The Pentecost, 1303-1305, fresco, Scrovegni Chapel, Padua
Around the same time Master Honoré was winding it down, the Florentine artist Giotto was painting complex spatial arrangements with solid-seeming figures on walls and panels. Some have suggested that Master Honoré's interest in light and form was inspired by Italy.
Later Gothic painting will add the new art from Italy to its influences. And this needs a full post. The art of the West forms from the union of Italian and "Northern" approaches. So we'll leave off with the reminder that art is a concept with a history of its own. What art is depends on where and when you are. Techne and phronesis are theoretical - to understand how the art of the West inverted, we have to see how it unfolded historically.
Jean Pucelle, The Annunciation, from the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, 1325-28, Metropolitan Museum, New York
Pucelle is the next big name that we know of in Gothic manuscript painting, and comparing him to Master Honoré shows the impact of Italian ideas about space and pictorial narrative.
As for the Gothic, its importance is unnoted in most general histories. There are patterns in Western culture that extend way back into the Middle Ages:
A trans-nationalist aristocratic elite
The ultimate power of financial interests
Flattening ontology by blending church and crown
and now
Commercialization and professionalization of the arts
But none of this was theoretical yet. These are socio-cultural structures that evolved organically out of the end of antiquity. It's why it all looks so sincere. The idea wasn't malevolent. No one was jacking an existing structure, they were building a new one. And they really were motivated by beauty.
See the descendant of Master Honoré's ornamental border?
But they laid the foundation. The abominations came later.
