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| Simone Martini, The Angel of the Annunciation, 1333, tempera on wood, National Gallery of Art |
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.
Comments are welcome, but moderated for obvious reasons. If you don't see it right away, don't worry. We check a couple times a day and it will be up there.
This post will continue the look at Gothic painting we started in the last roots of the art of the West post [click for a link]. Things are a bit fluid right now because we are jumping around - the threads running at the moment are the art of the West, occult posts on Hermes, and speculative posts on how meaning works. But all of them reflect on the same moment in history - the start of the path to the cultural inversion of Modernism in the late Middle Ages.
This process is also more complicated then we first expected. The plan was to see how art had become corrupted to the point where the Armory Show happens in 1913. How it became the Art! that plagues us today. But that turned out to mean completely scrapping and rethinking the standard art narrative that you see in general histories and timelines. What we are doing here is totally new - for us and in general. It's meant looking at an enormous amount of art to find patterns and tendencies that are really there. It's also a big reason why the posts have slowed down.
It is true that the Band has thought about the art of the West before, but never a total reframe of the simple assumptions that we all take for granted. We always assumed that Modern art just sort of happened. A twist of fate. A consequence of the changing times. Progress and so forth. The usual drivel.
Henri Matisse, Paysage de Collioure, 1906-1907, oil on canvas, private collection
That somehow it was just a natural occurrence that this infantile spastic became a seminal figure in art and one of the most important painters of the early 20th century.
His work even appeared in the Armory Show of 1913.
Then again, we'd never realized how spiritually, intellectually, and perceptually deficient post-Enlightenment ontology was.
Never even thought about ontology at all, outside the pathless arcana of academic philosophy.
But the Band's journey has made new things clear. There are ontological levels - levels of reality, so to speak - that correspond with epistemological modes and the pillars of Western culture. We aren't going to recap this here - we've worked these out over numerous posts and they aren't concise. The last post summarizes the vertical ontology part, the rest follows. If you are interested, here's a link to one post that works through the connection between the pillars of the West and the vertical ontology.
New version of the unified graphic assembled from earlier posts.
TL;DR - what we can know and how we can know it are tied together by Logos. Each level manifests in one pillar of Western culture. The nature of the West, like the nature of reality, comes from the interaction of the three.
The point is that once you can see the fullness of this structure, it becomes obvious that the standard narratives are woefully inadequate - either to account for the reality of the West or it's cultural forms. It's why they've collapsed into retardation. And the destruction of Western art was so thorough and vicious that it must have been something the beast system saw as important to invert.
Pablo Picasso, 1909, Femme Assise, oil on canvas, private
Modernism attacks the basic purpose of art as phronesis - visually transmitting some sort of truth. It does this with the toxic sham of "autonomy" - that the only true subject of art is art. And since the reality is that "art" is an arbitrary cultural distinction, you wind up with recursivity - a spiral of artists and critics self-referencing into irrelevance. Except for the money laundering part. That keeps the whole thing going.
There's always "theory" too. Cubism is an attempt to show things from multiple viewpoints at once. Turn a picture into recombinated facets. Literally breaking up - destroying - representation. Explicitly to call attention to the painting as a physical object and not a communication. It becomes about itself, not a larger truth. It's neutered. Recursivity.
It isn't even hiding.
We've realized that art is important. The Band started using pictures as a way to represent ideas. To broaden the written posts with visual messaging as well. Just like how we make graphics to show the relationships between concepts. But it's become clear that art is how cultures represent themselves to themselves and their posterity. Art records values, events, people, and what they all mean. It's a way to bring beauty into the world and sub-create - as Tolkien would say - in the image of God.
Frederik Marinus Kruseman, Figures at Work in a Winter Landscape, an Approaching Storm Beyond, 1859, oil on canvas, private
It doesn't even have to be a profound message. A glimpse of lifestyle, social values, physical conditions - all the factors that define a culture. Many places in the world deal with cold winters. This is a uniquely Dutch take on the season. Faith and sociability in a distinctive setting.
The Kruseman and the Picasso are exactly 60 years apart. They might as well come from different worlds. Deliberate cultural degradation happens quickly.
The art story turned out to be the same inverted Flatland toxin as the rest of Modern secular transcendence. The problem goes beyond the artists to the inverted discourse that defined Art! - the huge incestuous web critics and institutions dismantling culture and beauty for globalist paymasters. Ask why Picasso and its ilk were ever even included in shows or discussions of art? Why influential champions and big money pushed and pushed for them? Boutiques don't put bottles of raw sewage in the perfume display. Chicken carcasses aren't entered in dog shows. Why would this trash have ever even appeared at all?
And all of that brought us to this sobering realization.
One that goes back to the beginnings, figures out what the art of the West actually is, then builds a truthful history of visual beauty, logos, and cultural reality. These posts are not that. They're too limited. But they are laying out the parameters. Ontological, epistemological and historical responsibility. It's a totally different map than the liars of Art! have plagued us with for so long because it is aligns with what we can know and how we can know it.
John Hulsey, Moonrise Road, oil on canvas
A history leading to contemporary art where artists offer insight and reflction into our world in visually engaging ways.
This means the whole official apparatus has to go. All the fake authorities - critics, museums, institutions, etc. This is what makes the task daunting - the rot and corruption has been spreading, reproducing, and metastasizing for over a century. There's no "restoring" this carcass. Tear down and rebuild.
All that to say that the structure we are mapping out in these posts is new. We're figuring it out as we go - not by digging into the vast amount of art research that has been done, but by rethinking art as a concept. Where did it come from, what formed it, and how does it relate to the West. Right now, we're on the road to Modernism. But to get there, we have to identify where art came from in the first place. And what we've found is that the Gothic era is where earlier medieval culture develops into the beginnings of the modern art system.
The Adoration of the Magi, Le Tellier de Courtanvaulx Hours f.71, vellum, from Paris, c.1460
To qualify, we are working with the publicly-available historical record. We're not proposing new facts like Rembrandt really came from Atlantis. This manuscript was pulled from a sale auction catalog. We're trusting that the
We're just cutting out the converged interpretations of what it means.
When we understand how painting forms as an art of the West, we see just how obscene a historical violation Modernism was. Painting in the West gets started in books! Of course it communicates. And this gives us a little insight into the way "theory" constructs fake realities. Something very relevant in this era of official atavism and beast-system lies.
One thing about theory is that is is always post-facto. It "explains" things that already exist or have happened. It doesn't tell you what something must be - it tells you what is likely based on what was. The theory says art as a concept in the West starts in the Renaissance. What we're seeing is that art is theorized in the Renaissance. But the practices that the theory refers to were already developing socially and economically well before the first fake theorist lied to the first mark.
Edgar Degas, The Two Connoisseurs, 1880, monotype in dark gray on ivory wove paper, Art Institute of Chicago
The pattern of the con is simple and based on the illusion of authority. The fake theorist always claims expertise. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn't, but they all claim it. Then they leverage the authority of this expertise to define rules or terms for the activity in absolute sense - think "true" communism. At first the rules exert control over the activity and then they come to replace it.
Contrast with the Band. We started out with no claims of authority and openly worked through what we can legitimately claim to know. From there we looked at the historical arc of art and culture in the West. Only then did we start theorizing - to be fair, describing art as phronesis is a theoretical claim. So is calling art an associative resemblance-based reference. But these claims aren't trying to violate and invert the past - they're based on observing it.
Once we see how those socio-economic factors developed, we can consider the distorting effects of theory on an organic cultural practice.
We're just cutting out the converged interpretations of what it means.
When we understand how painting forms as an art of the West, we see just how obscene a historical violation Modernism was. Painting in the West gets started in books! Of course it communicates. And this gives us a little insight into the way "theory" constructs fake realities. Something very relevant in this era of official atavism and beast-system lies.
One thing about theory is that is is always post-facto. It "explains" things that already exist or have happened. It doesn't tell you what something must be - it tells you what is likely based on what was. The theory says art as a concept in the West starts in the Renaissance. What we're seeing is that art is theorized in the Renaissance. But the practices that the theory refers to were already developing socially and economically well before the first fake theorist lied to the first mark.
Edgar Degas, The Two Connoisseurs, 1880, monotype in dark gray on ivory wove paper, Art Institute of Chicago
The pattern of the con is simple and based on the illusion of authority. The fake theorist always claims expertise. Sometimes this is true, sometimes it isn't, but they all claim it. Then they leverage the authority of this expertise to define rules or terms for the activity in absolute sense - think "true" communism. At first the rules exert control over the activity and then they come to replace it.
Contrast with the Band. We started out with no claims of authority and openly worked through what we can legitimately claim to know. From there we looked at the historical arc of art and culture in the West. Only then did we start theorizing - to be fair, describing art as phronesis is a theoretical claim. So is calling art an associative resemblance-based reference. But these claims aren't trying to violate and invert the past - they're based on observing it.
Once we see how those socio-economic factors developed, we can consider the distorting effects of theory on an organic cultural practice.
Going back over the history and looking for traits, several things stand out:
A working definition of the art of the West based on the Greek terms - as technical skill used to visualize some aspect of Truth. It's really broad because we've realized that art is a form of cultural expression in the temporal material world.
Clodion-style vase from the Sèvres factory, 1875-1877, blue-ground porcelain with paste application and ormolu gilding, private
The specifics - forms, styles, media - will depend on the context. It's the idea of phronesis that distinguishes art from pictures, crafts, etc. Is this arbitrary? All categories are. But this one also also fits culturally, historically, and ontologically with reality.
A stunning vase that represents the classical roots of Western culture in an aesthetic way is much more a work of art than some ugly scribbles from a dyscivic hack.
Leading to there being no universal essence of "Art". Modernism was based on a fundamentally false assumption. Art is a contingent concept - what it looks like depends on it's cultural context. When globalists look to impose a single category of art for all the world they are doing that same satanic destruction of distinction, grey goo anti-Creation that permeates everything they do. So we want the art of the West. Other cultures have their own ideas about pictures and symbols.
There is no way to distinguish art from pictures in general and have it be a category that can apply to all cultures.
Christ Pantakrator, late 19th century Russian icon, private, Eastern Tibeten Thanka, with the Green Tara (Samaya Tara Yogini) in the center, 18th century, Rubin Museum of Art; William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Le Crabe, 1869, oil on canvas, private; Pablo Picasso, 1911, La Femme au Violon, oil on canvas, private, on long-term loan to Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Other than being pictures, A Russian icon, a Tibetan Thangka, a Western portrait, and a smear of Modern trash are not the same thing. They aren't understood to relate to reality or the onlooker in the same way and they play very different socio-cultural roles.
Modern frauds argue backwards - because they have nothing in common beyond being marks on a surface, that's what art is. Except special marks, because reasons. It's utterly retarded. One is a conduit to God, one is a visualization of spiritual teachings, one is a physical likeness, and one is weaponized atavism.
Then there's the rise of the aristocracy - how from before there were European nations there were divisions between aristocrats or nobles - elites - and regular people. Over time, this becomes two different cultures within state boundaries. There's the nation - the actual people - and the elite. One had a national culture and identity, the other international proto-global ones.
Georges Jules Victor Clairin, The Arrival of the Guests, Venice, 19th century, oil on canvas, private
A working definition of the art of the West based on the Greek terms - as technical skill used to visualize some aspect of Truth. It's really broad because we've realized that art is a form of cultural expression in the temporal material world.
Clodion-style vase from the Sèvres factory, 1875-1877, blue-ground porcelain with paste application and ormolu gilding, private
The specifics - forms, styles, media - will depend on the context. It's the idea of phronesis that distinguishes art from pictures, crafts, etc. Is this arbitrary? All categories are. But this one also also fits culturally, historically, and ontologically with reality.
A stunning vase that represents the classical roots of Western culture in an aesthetic way is much more a work of art than some ugly scribbles from a dyscivic hack.
Leading to there being no universal essence of "Art". Modernism was based on a fundamentally false assumption. Art is a contingent concept - what it looks like depends on it's cultural context. When globalists look to impose a single category of art for all the world they are doing that same satanic destruction of distinction, grey goo anti-Creation that permeates everything they do. So we want the art of the West. Other cultures have their own ideas about pictures and symbols.
There is no way to distinguish art from pictures in general and have it be a category that can apply to all cultures.
Christ Pantakrator, late 19th century Russian icon, private, Eastern Tibeten Thanka, with the Green Tara (Samaya Tara Yogini) in the center, 18th century, Rubin Museum of Art; William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Le Crabe, 1869, oil on canvas, private; Pablo Picasso, 1911, La Femme au Violon, oil on canvas, private, on long-term loan to Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich
Other than being pictures, A Russian icon, a Tibetan Thangka, a Western portrait, and a smear of Modern trash are not the same thing. They aren't understood to relate to reality or the onlooker in the same way and they play very different socio-cultural roles.
Modern frauds argue backwards - because they have nothing in common beyond being marks on a surface, that's what art is. Except special marks, because reasons. It's utterly retarded. One is a conduit to God, one is a visualization of spiritual teachings, one is a physical likeness, and one is weaponized atavism.
Then there's the rise of the aristocracy - how from before there were European nations there were divisions between aristocrats or nobles - elites - and regular people. Over time, this becomes two different cultures within state boundaries. There's the nation - the actual people - and the elite. One had a national culture and identity, the other international proto-global ones.
Georges Jules Victor Clairin, The Arrival of the Guests, Venice, 19th century, oil on canvas, private
The gradual overlapping of the secular and the sacred is related to the rise of noble power. The arts of the West start out mainly as a religious affair. But as the Middle Ages pass, the nobility and especially the monarchy take over - both their own private patronage and funding for religious art too. These are the factors that come together to give the art of the West its distinctive form.
Painting will become the most advanced Western art - and the one people in the West are most likely to associate with the word "art". It's been around for ages - there are paintings that are far older then the oldest known languages.
Prehistoric paintings from the Lascaux Cave in France, dated around 15,000-17,000 BC.
This is not that old for prehistoric art - there are cave paintings dated over twice as old. The oldest dated language is from the 4th millennium BC.
Most broadly defined, painting is just the application of paint to a surface. Some liquid suspension of pigment that will adhere to something. The variations throughout history are endless, but they're all organizations of lines and colors that mean something.
Painting in the modern system of the arts is more restricted. The standard is the picture - a painting on canvas, paper, panel, or some other smooth prepared surface that is suitable for display and collecting. Remember, socio-economics drive concepts of art, not the theory that barnacles along later. We have to add wall or mural painting in there too for historical development reasons. A lot of the earlier development of the art of the West took place on the walls and ceilings of buildings.
Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted between 1509 and 1512. The walls of the chapel got their frescos in the 1480s, except Michelangelo's Last Judgment on the back wall from 1536-1541
It's the most famous example of this Italian wall painting tradition.
Same artists doing both as well. Sometimes wall paintings can be taken out, framed, and hung in museums like pictures - it happens a lot with ancient painting, but there are later examples too.
Like these frescos from Melozzi da Forli in the Vatican Museum from the 1480s. It's easy to see how they've been mounted and hung like ordinary paintings.
It's this close genealogy that makes us treat wall paintings and pictures together. When Renaissance humanists were first theorizing the art of the West, this is what painting meant to them. So this becomes the default starting point for the theoretical concept of art that carries into modernity.
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014-2015
When Modernism inverts art, it happens in this Renaissance social construct . The Modernists keep the construct - art, painting, theory - but reverses the meaning into demented self-referentiality. Representing is what art had been doing since before there was art. Pictures depict.
So with our working definition in mind and history as a guide, it is obvious that any attempt to reconnect the art of the West to logos will have to involve painting. So we're looking at how painting was understood before the Modern inversion - how it came to be the preeminent art form.
What we see is that painting in medieval Europe starts slowly after being pretty common in classical antiquity. There are reasons for this - Germanic and Celtic cultures didn't have traditions of painting so there was no real thought of the frescos and panel pictures of Greece and Rome. We do see wall painting in churches in the earlier Middle Ages, but this is replaced in the Gothic period for stained glass.
Choir windows in Reims Cathedral
There are a lot of images here - it's art, but not painting in the fine art sense. Gothic cathedrals also had a lot of sculpture. Also art, but not painting.
The the last post showed how the conditions for the Modern concept of painting really got started in manuscripts. With no one universal concept of "art" picture making develops freely along different channels. Classical Roman influence filtered through the abstract linear art of the Germanic and Celtic peoples in different ways in different contexts. But despite this manuscript painting shows two critically important areas of development that unfold together.
Painting will become the most advanced Western art - and the one people in the West are most likely to associate with the word "art". It's been around for ages - there are paintings that are far older then the oldest known languages.
Prehistoric paintings from the Lascaux Cave in France, dated around 15,000-17,000 BC.
This is not that old for prehistoric art - there are cave paintings dated over twice as old. The oldest dated language is from the 4th millennium BC.
Most broadly defined, painting is just the application of paint to a surface. Some liquid suspension of pigment that will adhere to something. The variations throughout history are endless, but they're all organizations of lines and colors that mean something.
Painting in the modern system of the arts is more restricted. The standard is the picture - a painting on canvas, paper, panel, or some other smooth prepared surface that is suitable for display and collecting. Remember, socio-economics drive concepts of art, not the theory that barnacles along later. We have to add wall or mural painting in there too for historical development reasons. A lot of the earlier development of the art of the West took place on the walls and ceilings of buildings.
Michelangelo's famous Sistine Chapel ceiling was painted between 1509 and 1512. The walls of the chapel got their frescos in the 1480s, except Michelangelo's Last Judgment on the back wall from 1536-1541
It's the most famous example of this Italian wall painting tradition.
Same artists doing both as well. Sometimes wall paintings can be taken out, framed, and hung in museums like pictures - it happens a lot with ancient painting, but there are later examples too.
Like these frescos from Melozzi da Forli in the Vatican Museum from the 1480s. It's easy to see how they've been mounted and hung like ordinary paintings.
It's this close genealogy that makes us treat wall paintings and pictures together. When Renaissance humanists were first theorizing the art of the West, this is what painting meant to them. So this becomes the default starting point for the theoretical concept of art that carries into modernity.
The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World show at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014-2015
When Modernism inverts art, it happens in this Renaissance social construct . The Modernists keep the construct - art, painting, theory - but reverses the meaning into demented self-referentiality. Representing is what art had been doing since before there was art. Pictures depict.
So with our working definition in mind and history as a guide, it is obvious that any attempt to reconnect the art of the West to logos will have to involve painting. So we're looking at how painting was understood before the Modern inversion - how it came to be the preeminent art form.
What we see is that painting in medieval Europe starts slowly after being pretty common in classical antiquity. There are reasons for this - Germanic and Celtic cultures didn't have traditions of painting so there was no real thought of the frescos and panel pictures of Greece and Rome. We do see wall painting in churches in the earlier Middle Ages, but this is replaced in the Gothic period for stained glass.
Choir windows in Reims Cathedral
There are a lot of images here - it's art, but not painting in the fine art sense. Gothic cathedrals also had a lot of sculpture. Also art, but not painting.
The the last post showed how the conditions for the Modern concept of painting really got started in manuscripts. With no one universal concept of "art" picture making develops freely along different channels. Classical Roman influence filtered through the abstract linear art of the Germanic and Celtic peoples in different ways in different contexts. But despite this manuscript painting shows two critically important areas of development that unfold together.
1. The socio-economic structures of the art of the West. Manuscript painting transitions from something mainly done by monastic scribes to professional artists in a commercial market for elite clients. Now remember who the elite are. Before we think about art as a theoretical space, we have to consider it as a socio-economic one.
The Coronation of the Virgin from the , 1310-1320, British Museum, Arundel 83 II f.134v
In Gothic painting, the subject matter stays similar. What changes is the addition of aristocratic values. Art communicates with what seems like raw sense data, but it's really a construct. So we have to consider the perspective that the picture is constructed from.
Painting layers connotations and shades of meaning on top of the ostensible subject - it depicts it in a certain way. What you see and how you see it. It makes a big difference to a Christian's social attitudes if they associate Mary with a humble peasant or a queen.
Remember, a representation is a sign and signs are associative. Even though pictures look like their subjects, they are no more the interchangeable with them than a word. What is different is how the association is made. This was the reason for revisiting Peirce - not because his semiotic model is some final word. It isn't. But he is a good reminder not to mistake pictures as being more "natural" than words just because they resemble what they represent.
This is what we mean when we say Peirce has limitations. The Band recently had an encounter with an programmer that got us thinking about the semiotics of programming. There are at least two intermediaries between the communicator and the receiver - the programmer operates in a hierarchical coded language that is mechanically compiled and transformed into an interactive audio-visual user experience.
In Peirce's terms, coding is symbolic. In the users' experience, video graphics are iconic, spoken words and text are symbolic, music is an emotional signifier that Peirce doesn't deal with. There's the whole interactivity thing that neither semiotics nor discourse analysis really handle. And since the user experience is the result of the programmer's code while appearing different from that code, we can call it all an index of the original coding.
Semiotics are in dire need of an overhaul for the digital age. And not performed by midwitted globalists that pass for academics today..
Don't worship heuristics. Take what is valuable and keep building onward.
2. The ontological status of a picture in the art of the West. Peirce is useful because he reminds us that all signs are associative and that different types of sign associate differently. And while his Iconic signs like pictures do so by resemblance - they look enough like their subjects for us to associate one with the other.
The problem is in what we mean by resemblance.
Our brains seem wired to see material things in abstract arrangements. Even random things like a Rorschach blot. Pictograms work because we can add so much visual information to turn something into a picture. Stick men are the same way. Arrange simple lines in the right configuration and people see a person in it. It resembles a person because it "looks like" one, even though it doesn't look like a person at all.
Johann Gottfried Steffan, Bramois Wallis 1861, oil on canvas, private
A hyper-realistic picture also looks like the subject - just more so.
Resemblance is therefore a quality that has levels or degrees - qualitative degrees. And this brings us to realism.
Realism is the degree to which the
picture resembles its subject.
This seems painfully simplistic, but it needs to be stated clearly. Plus realism isn't an absolute metric - there are personal and cultural factors that determine what registers as realistic to a particular person. That said, anyone can see that Steffan's landscape looks more like an actual place than the stickman looks like a real person.
Alfred Sisley, Après-midi de mai à By, près de Moret-sur-Loing. around 1882, oil on canvas, private
So realism is like almost every quality in this entropic fallen material world - an ideal objectivity with a blurry, subjective outline.
This is where vertical ontology is so important. When you can see the difference between the absolute clarity of an abstract ideal and the its material manifestations, you don't confuse them like a moron. No thing is equally realistic to everyone. Postmodernism is codified retardation, so it isn't surprising that they reject the idea of realism because it doesn't conform perfectly in practice to one absolute definition. Since we aren't satanic or imbecilic, we can treat material realism as a tendency. A quality that things in different contexts have to varying degrees.
This is why we've considered the realism of the Gothic era in its historical context. None of the manuscripts look that realistic next to a modern photo. But thinking about a scene as people interacting in an imaginary space is a different relationship between representation and reality than diagramming ideas with pictograms.
Christ Enthroned, around 800, ink, pigments and gold on vellum, from the Book of Kells, f.32v, Trinity College, Dublin; The Boucicaut Master, St. Jerome from the Heures de Maréchal de Boucicaut, 1410-1415, parchment, Jacquemart Andre Museum, Paris
What realism means in medieval painting is the extent to which it was a priority to make illustrations realistic and how did they do so if it was. Because this gets to how people think of a picture - what a picture is seen to be. Do they think of it more like pictogram or like a window into an imaginary world?
The standard history of painting puts a lot of weight on how the idea of space developed - how pictures came to get illusions of real depth. This is something can be seen looking at the artworks. It's historical reality that early medieval art is very flat and linear because the Germanic and Celtic arts are based on flat, linear decoration. The idea of the imaginary space wasn't something they even thought of. It wasn't part of their concept of what a picture was.
Early medieval art uses resemblance in something closer to the stickman or pictogram way. This is not a swipe at the quality - The Book of Kells is a masterpiece. It's a comment on how the work approaches visual communication.
Does the picture make it clear that this is a decorative arrangement on the surface that transmits a message through symbolic associations like the Book of Kells?
Or does it at least hint at the idea that this is an imaginary scene with some effort to represent the interactions and activities of real people in a real space like the Boucicaut Master? The elements still transmit symbolic messages, only more like actors in a theatrical space than a concept diagram.
There is no one cause for why this change happens. What matters is that we can observe that it did. For whatever combination of reasons, Gothic painting becomes steadily more realistic in creating spatial illusions and treating figures like 3D people within it.
The other feature that we see in Gothic painting is decorative luxury. Realism makes the pictures more believable and in theory easier to connect with. Luxury adds aristocratic connotations and refined beauty. Of course, beauty and refinement are also contingent material manifestations of unattainable ideals. But they are also qualitative standards that art can be judged by. They're culturally dependent in ways, but that's the nature of the material world. Cultural expressions are culturally dependent. Which is why we have cultures.
The Limbourg Brothers, Christ Led to the Praetorium from the Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry, f. 143r, Conde Museum
Over the course of the Gothic era manuscript painting becomes more realistic and more beautiful as it becomes more aristocratic.
Spatial illusion and refined beauty add to the main message. It's still a Passion scene to reflect on, only in a splendid Flamboyant Gothic cityscape with bright colors and gold trim.
Très Riches Heures du duc de Berry is such a magnificent manuscript. It's late - technically International Gothic, but so refined and aesthetically pleasing.
Refined beauty and developing realism are signs of an emerging artistic self-consciousness. The idea that there are standards pictures strive for beyond just communicating information like a pictogram. It's sort of tautological, but its like the "art" of making a picture. Not literally - the medieval arts needed to be theoretically grounded in objective principles and painting was still considered a craft - workshop-based techniques handed down through apprenticeships.
But before you can codify something, you need to be aware that there is something to codify.
Richard Cosway, Group of Connoisseurs, 1775, oil on canvas, Towneley Hall Art Gallery & Museum
The socio-cultural consensus that pictures had qualities to assess was the necessary precursor to defining art theoretically.
But theoretical definitions are always after the fact - the question we need to ask is whether we can consider this part of the art of the West. This isn't an idle question. It's the point of this whole historical inquiry into art.
This is the Band's take: the theoretical construct that begins in the Renaissance, devolves to Modernism, and established the definition of "art" as a concept, is nonsensical and inverted. It's Art! It was concocted after art was develops organically, distorted what happened to fit the theorists' retarded myths, then replaced the organic practice with its mythical nonsense. Once art is dependent on the inconsistent, historically ignorant and self-serving intellectual vacuity of the theorists, it can be corrupted into whatever they say it is.
Parmigianino, Madonna with the Long Neck, 1534-1540, oil on panel, Uffizi Museum
Consider the Mannerist art of the 16th century that followed the designation of painting as a theory-based art. The weird radiation-poisoned baby, the bizarre proportions and wet t-shirt look of the Madonna, the incoherent pillar and tiny prophet, the inappropriately sexualized angels crowded in an impossibly small place on the left, are all "artistic" touches that undermine the beauty and clarity of the message.
Mannerism is the first prelude to the do what thou wilt atavism of Modernism. Cultural collapse doesn't happen overnight. Parmagianino was a skilled technician. The point is how ceding control of culture to "theorists" starts the path to corruption, perversion and inversion.
There is a lesson here. For inversion to happen, there has to be a break with the truth. It can be a small one at first - all that is needed is to form concepts and institutions around things that aren't real. Lies, errors, well-intentioned hopes - the specifics don't matter. What matters is that there is an element of society falsely believed to operate on ideas or principles that aren't actually real. And once something isn't tethered to reality, it can become whatever the narrative engineers want it to be. Falsely defining the art of the West around the objectively stupid opinions of self-fluffing Renaissance luciferians is what opened the path to all the Modern lies to come.
In reality, we can see that an identifiable concept of art was forming in the Gothic period.
Boucicaut Master, The Flight into Egypt from the Hours of Maréchal de Boucicaut, 1410-1415, ink, tempera and gold on parchment, Musée Jacquemart André, Paris
It had a a defined socio-economic profile, established creators, and technical and aesthetic standards of quality external to the information content of the representation.
More International Gothic. The Boucicaut Master was a contemporary of the Limbourg Brothers. You can see how they kept the linear curving grace of the earlier Gothic and built up the realism and the refined beauty.
And what about these standards - the increasingly realistic and refined painting that we see in Gothic manuscripts? Renaissance theory may not have thought much of this, but realism and beauty fit perfectly with an idea of art based techne, episteme, and phronesis.
The rest of this post will build on our Gothic painting observations by considering the missing piece of the puzzle. We mentioned the influence of a new art from Italy in the last post. This isn't an exaggeration. The Italians developed their own unique artistic culture that reflected the unique cultural and historical circumstances of the region. It was here more than the north of Europe that the outline of the modern art world forms. This is a prelude of the Renaissance that was just around the corner.
So what makes Italy so different? Look at the map of Celtic Europe from before the rise of the Roman Empire:
Most of pre-Roman Europe was demographically and culturally Celtic with localized remnants of older tribal people like the Picts. There were Celtic incursions into Italy, but the peninsula remained culturally and demographically distinct. It isn't just convenience to consider Italy separately. The cultural history of the peninsula is different from anywhere else in Western Europe from the beginning of civilization.
The dominant Iron Age powers in Italy were the future Romans - the Italic tribes in orange and Etruscans in bright green - in the center and the Greek colonies in brown in the south. The Ligurians in purple and Apulians in olive green are also unique to Italy.
None of these people had any significant presence further north.
After the fall of the western empire, the Classical legacy remained stronger in Italy than elsewhere. Roman ruins and artifacts were more common, and the linear ornamental Celtic art of most of Iron Age Europe had no presence here.
The art of Imperial Christianity grows out of Imperial art [the second half of this post looks at the beginning of Imperial Christian art]. So there is a direct link to the Roman past in the arts of Medieval Italy. Germanic tribes move in during late antiquity, but not the Franks who'll dominate Northern and Central Europe, but Ostrogoths and then Lombards.
The interior of S. Maria Maggiore, a grand basilica built in Rome in the 430s. The roof and window level were replaced after a fire, but the strip of mosaic pictures below the windows is original. So are the ones above the big arch on the back wall.
The impact of places like this on the medieval Roman imagination was profound.
Take a closer look at the 5th-century mosaic art from the back wall above the triumphal arch. It's late antiquity, but the Classical influence is still easy to spot:
High profile places like this kept past influence strong. They also needed upkeep, so new artists could get direct exposure to ancient ways of doing things by working on the same pieces.
Jacopo Torriti, Apse mosaic, finished 1296, S. Maria Maggiore, Rome.
The coiling plants are from the 5th century, but Mary and Jesus are late 13th-century additions. Torreti was a leading Roman artists. Here he is working directly with late antique art.
There is a far stronger Byzantine influence as well. Italy was reconquered by the Byzantines for a while, the Venetians had strong commercial ties to the Empire, and large numbers of Byzantines fled to Italy during existential crises like the Iconoclasm or fall of Constantinople.
Over the 6th and 7th centuries the Germanic Lombards expand their control over Italy, pushing out the Byzantines. It's the Lombard threat that leads the pope to ally with the Franks and eventually crown Charlemagne Emperor of the West in 800.
Byzantine art is also a derivative of Classicial art. They're different, but there's a genealogical tie. And the continual presence of Byzantine icons in Italy kept the tie close.
8th-century painting on the walls of S. Maria Antiqua, a 5th-century Roman church.
Byzantine artists emigrated to Rome during the Iconoclasm, when the Byzantine Empire banned religious images. The pope rejected iconoclasm, making the Western church a safe haven. This sharpened the divide between Eastern and Western Churches.
The classical echoes in medieval Italian culture make it easy to adapt Byzantine ideas - they're parallel post-classical traditions in a way that the Germano-Celtic influences in Carolingian art are not.
"Italy" itself is not unified. Italy is a word that we're using for convenience. Because the internal differences between regions are pretty profound. "Italian" painting is generalizing. We actually mean the schools of certain culturally-advanced cities or regions. In the Gothic period, the Tuscan cities were at the front of a new approach to painting - especially arch-rivals Florence and Siena
Italy at its most divided. Some of these jurisdictions were short lived but it's easy to see where the strong local and regional identities come in.
The Tuscan centers of Florence, Siena, and Pisa are in the bottom right quadrant.
In an earlier architecture post we looked at the unique circumstances of central Italy. Small, wealthy, high literacy societies with minimal military strength. Competition plays out economically and culturally, with elements of civic pride tied into artistic and literary accomplishments. Different rulership structures too - not the same national monarchies coalescing out of post-Carolingian feudalism that we saw north of the Alps. The medieval Tuscan cities develop republican governments with ruling councils rather than hereditary dynasts.
In Florence, positions on the ruling council were allotted to the guilds - trade associations that regulated different crafts and professions. Eventually the bankers guild will dominate with their leading family - the Medici - becoming defacto monarchical rulers. But during the Gothic period the banking system hadn't fully developed and power was more distributed.
The Orsanmichele is a grain market in Florence that was built in 1337, and converted into the chapel for the guilds. Not the contrast between the heavy round arches and Gothic decoration added after conversion into a church
The statues were added by the guilds in the early 1400s and are considered landmarks of Renaissance art
This is government by economic interest rather than landed aristocracy. This is one of the reasons why
In reality, progress requires a endpoint. This is progress towards establishing money as the condition of rulership.
The difference between between the Renaissance and Modern elites comes from their relative scales. The late medieval Florentine elite were from a small city without modern transportation and communications. Their worldview was fundamentally Christian, even if their conduct didn't always show it. And they were just laying the first foundation stones of an international financial system. The notion of "globalism" as we think of it would have been inconceivable to them. This will change, but Florentine patriotism is actually a central theme in the socio-economic changes of the late Middle Ages/early Renaissance - wealth finances culture and culture promotes the glory of Florence.
Arnolfio di Cambio and Giotto di Bondone, Giotto's Campanile, begun 1298, Florence
The republican government and elites spent heavily on public art. The Cathedral is the biggest of these works, and it, the bell tower and older baptistry in the foreground also had lots of sculpture.
The famous painter Giotto took over the bell tower in 1334 - the finished tower is after his design. The tower has some Gothic elements, but the colored paneling is an Italian thing.
The elongated upper story isn't a mistake - its designed to be seen from below. From that angle it looks like all three upper stories are the same height.
Architectural theory was based around proportion but Giotto adjusts the measurements to suit the viewer. Unlike modern anti-humans, he recognized that theoretical absolutes have to accommodate the imprecise nature of material reality.
Not to say the elites were men of the people - tactical demagoguery aside, they weren't. It's just that their lifestyle wasn't isolated and olympian like the modern elite who can go a lifetime barely exchanging words with ordinary people. They were partially distinguished by class but hadn't developed into a fully different culture. So they saw themselves as Florentines, not world citizens trying to destroy the very notion of Florence to serve some satanic vision.
Put it together - the wealthiest towns in Europe, no landed aristocracy, republican government by financial interest, high per capita income, and strong civic patriotism, and it's a very different client class than we saw in Gothic Europe. Lots of affluent families able to support the panel and wall painting that Italy was famous for.
S. Croce in Florence - a Franciscan church started in the 1290s - showing the Bardi and Peruzzi Chapels. Rights to burial chapels were acquired by wealthy Italian families with the stipulation that they decorate them. Giotto painted both of these in the early 1300s with scenes in fresco from the life of St. Francis.
So privately funded art that is publicly visible and Christian themed. There's nothing like this in the Gothic north.
That's what makes Italy worth looking at on its own. A distinct culture with much stronger Classical and Byzantine ties supported by a broad, non-noble - in the post-Carolingian sense - social elite. A culture where the Gothic never really takes hold the way it does in the rest of Europe, and where painting develops into an art of its own.
The move towards realism in Gothic art is even more pronounced than in northern Europe - the consensus seems to be that it starts in Italy. This is plausible since the main types of painting are public - panel and wall paintings - and not illuminations in aristocratic books. It's during the 1200s that the altarpiece first appears in Italian churches, and these big paintings are a major place for artistic development.
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Rucellai Madonna, around 1285, tempera on panel, Uffizi Museum
Duccio is the first "celebrity" artist in Siena and is generally known by his first name only. The idea of artistic fame is a new development in medieval Italy and is a sign of social change. The idea of fame from cultural achievement is seen as one of the early signs of the Renaissance humanism that was just around the corner.
Notice the date and see how far along the path to a 3D concept of picture this is. The throne looks like it has real volume, but the real innovation is the way the light falls on the knee as if it was really sticking out. This huge altarpiece was 9 feet tall - like a billboard shining its new innovations.
The distinct history of Italy is what made the artistic changes of the 13th century possible, but it was a flood of Byzantine icons after the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204 [click for a good overview of icons and Italian painting]. Icons were panel paintings with saints and Biblical stories that had a defined theological function in Byzantine Orthodoxy. By repeating certain formulae, the icon was believed to facilitate a connection with the holy prototypes through a Neoplatonic ontology of resemblance.
In Western Christianity the icon doesn't have this status - the Western image had been treated like a visual text since the early Christian period.
First page of the Libri Carolini, 791-793, parchment, Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal. MS.663 f.1r, Paris
The Libri Carolini - four volumes prepared by Frankish theologians for Charlemagne around 792 responding to the Second Council of Nicaea of 787 - are a nice summary of the medieval Western position on religious images.The text is based on faulty translations of the Greek council and is riddled with errors, but it does reflect the Western medieval take on religious art.
The Libri Carolini lays out a middle ground - rejecting the reverence of the Byzantine icon and iconoclastic rejection alike. Images may be used as ecclesiastical ornaments, for purposes of instruction, and in memory of past events; it is foolish, however, to burn incense before them and to use lights, though it is quite wrong to cast them out of the churches and destroy them.
So Italians get the idea of portable paintings on panels from Byzantine icons, but without the icon theology. This meant without the formal rules that kept the style of icons from changing that much. Italian artists use icons as models for how to paint pictures - the types of figures, settings, and gold backgrounds. But without the theology there's no special attachment to the style and look of icons. Competition between artists in the Italian market drives innovations in realism. So Italian painting is inspired by icons, but changes quickly into the pre-Renaissance.
Archangel Michael and the monk Archippus at Chonae, icon from the first half of the 12th century, Saint Catherine's Monastery, Sinai, Egypt
Here's an icon for example. It's doubtful anyone from Italy ever saw this one, but it's in good condition and shows a narrative. The figures obviously derive from Classical painting but have become formulaic. The building is a token suggestion of structures and not realistic at all. And the background is golden emptiness. The holy figures are literally between you and a golden heaven.
Byzantine mosaics work the same way with formulaic figures over gold.
Many icons look more like portraits than stories. These were also formulaic, but were designed to facilitate a connection between you and the picture. Marian icons - icons of Mary - inspired the Italian Madonna and Child theme. These are the paintings that the linked article up above says replace relics as the primary focus for Italian religious devotion. The altarpiece is a big part of this new gusto for images. Compare the Duccio up above to this icon
Enthroned Madonna and Child, Italo-Byzantine, 13th century, tempera on panel, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
According to the linked article, this is blended in style - mainly Byzantine but with some Italian details. It's like a flatter Duccio. Because this is the kind of Byzantine painting that the Italians develop towards 3D realism.
Now for contrast, here is a really early Italian panel painting from shortly after the Byzantine art starts arriving. The concept is Byzantine, but the figures and scenes are flat in a Romanesque way and technically crude in comparison.
Maestro di Tressa, Madonna and Child with Angels and Saints, 1225-1250, tempera and silver on wood, Chigi -Saracini Collection, Siena
The idea of painting a panel painting is here, as is the effort to make the figure easy to connect with. Mary and Jesus stare right out. The icon shows how to paint figures that are more real and more graceful in comparison.
Byzantine painting is one of the influences on the northern Gothic, but they don't have the exposure or uptake that the Italians do. Look at the father of Florentine painting - Cimabue was the Sienese Duccio's early rival and another pre-Renaissance pioneer. The impact of the icons is obvious.
Cimabue, The Madonna and Child in Majesty Surrounded by Angels, circa 1280, tempera on wood, Louvre Museum
Cimabue and Duccio are really similar, with Duccio considered slightly more advanced in his realism. He's not modeling with light and shadow, but the figures are more solid than the icon. Getting rid of the gold lines on the figures helps.
The size difference is important too. Altarpieces get huge. This one is almost 14' tall. It really does sort of look like the throne is coming down and forward - this would seem more the case seen hanging behind the altar.
Altarpieces are a major place where Italian painting develops. Big public pictures in prestige sites fueled the competition that drove the evolution of Italian art. Every chapel needed an altarpiece throwing family pride into the mix. Art was a devotional focus, but it quickly became a kind of social currency in a place where lots of people could buy. Organizations get into it - the Duccio and Cimabue altarpieces seen here were paid for by religious fraternal organizations.
Duccio's epic Maestà is the climax of a late 13th-early 14th century altarpiece arms race between Florence and Siena. It was made for a massive expansion of Siena Cathedral that never happened and originally consisted of 43 pictures in a splendid Gothic frame. It was broken up for sale and individual panels are in museums around the world. The central panel is 7' x 14' and is still in Siena.
Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maestà, 1308–1311, tempera and gold on wood, Museo dell'Opera Metropolitana del Duomo, Siena
It's pretty easy to see the Byzantine origins and the Italian moves towards realism. The throne and figures seem to recede in space, Mary had a solid 3D presence, and Jesus is looking more like a child.
Here's how it would have looked together, as far as the experts can tell.
The scenes show events in the lives of Mary and Jesus. In the main panel, angels and saints make a receding crowd. The foremost saints are local patrons - the idea was to connect the vision of the heavenly Madonna and Child to Siena.
In the Northern Gothic posts we saw stained glass and metalwork. In Gothic Italy, it's painting that makes the big public spectacles.
The same applies to wall painting - the other big Italian place for public art. The history of Italian wall painting goes back to Etruscan times. The same influences that the Byzantines had on panel painting applied here too because the murals were usually broken into small scenes. In this post, the 8th-century paintings on the walls of S. Maria Antiqua and the 14th-century chapels in S. Croce in Florence are two snippets from the history.
Scanning the general histories, it seems that the Franciscan church of S. Francesco in Assisi was where wall painters show a new level of interest in realism. The problem is that there is also disagreement and uncertainty over who painted them.
Upper Church, San Francesco, begun 1228, Assisi.
San Francesco is confusing because it is made up of two churches - an upper and lower one - with both having frescos by 14th-century painters. It's the Upper Church that has the older ones that are considered trailblazing. Then there's also what appears to be a very old dispute over who the artist was that did such innovative work. The Florentine master Giotto is often credited, but there are reasons to question this. The Web Gallery of Art has a good set of San Francesco pictures and gives most of the Upper Church to Giotto - including the paintings in the photo above. Infogalactic says it could be three different painters. The Band has no idea who painted them - it looks kind of like Giotto - and so isn't concerned with that. The realism is more important than the who.
View of the Transept and Apse from the East, 1277-80, fresco, Upper Church, San Francesco, Assisi
The earliest paintings were by Cimabue. But they're so damaged that they're hard to see.
Fresco is paint on wet plaster so it dries into the wall. It is pretty durable, but not indestructible.
The painting in the Upper Church that seems to get the most attention is a long cycle of the life of St. Francis. These are often credited to Giotto because the realism is so new compared to other painting from the time. They're more realistic than the Gothic painting of France was, even in the 1350s. The realism manifests in two ways - coherent 3D scenes with solid-seeming figures in imaginary space, and believable human interactions. Both are visible in this example.
St. Francis Master/Giotto, The Confirmation of the Rule by Innocentius III, 1295, fresco, Upper Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi
Francis, the pope, and their crews angle back into in what seems like a real interior with protruding architecture. The perspective isn't perfect but its the idea of thinking of a painting as something taking place in an actual room is novel. And the figures don't seem like the flat shapes of an icon or the lines of northern illuminations. It's like they have real mass.
Note how they communicate naturally - the gestures, facial expressions, poses, angles of the heads all seem like real people.
What makes the Assisi frescos so important is how new this realism is. The origins of the underlying elements in Byzantine and late antique art are easy to see, but the solidity and clarity of the scene seem to come out of nowhere. Considering that the experts seem unsure of why this happens, the Band has no theory of causes. The Franciscans were known for meditating on the natural world - maybe they were inclined towards realistic art. Who knows? What matters is that these frescos appear and having appeared, influence the future.
Giotto (Giotto di Bondone, 1267-1337) really comes into his own in the next decade and its easy to see why he'd be connected to the Upper Basilica. His cycle of frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua are a series of individual scenes like San Francesco, but telling the stories of Mary and Jesus.
Scrovegni Chapel, finished by 1303, Giotto's frescos from 1303-1306, Padua
Click for the Web Gallery of Art link to the chapel. The pictures aren't the highest quality but there are quite a few of them with some background info. This is Giotto's masterpiece and the paintings still look good today.
This is a good picture of the layout. The scenes are neatly arranged in rows with a big Last Judgment on the altar wall. Even at this scale, Giotto's clear orderly style stands out.
Giotto, Adoration of the Magi, 1304-06, fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua
Solid figures with clear expressions in spatially-coherent settings. Giotto is the late medieval father of realism.
Wall painting also can operate on a scale that books and panels can't match. Giotto's Last Judgment takes up an entire wall with a cosmic Christ enthroned in judgment and the dead rising to Heaven or cast into a Dante-esque Hell. Part of the appeal of painting will be the ability to depict almost anything. There are obviously limits, but compared to mosaic and sculpture, that isn't far off.
Giotto, The Last Judgment, 1304-06, fresco, Cappella Scrovegni, Padua
Notably, it isn't Giotto who has the big impact at first because it's Duccio's students that carry Italian painting forward in different directions. The Lorenzetti brothers take up the realism, pushing the idea of rational space into unified interiors that are close to one-point perspective. Working out perspective in the early 1400s is considered a major achievement in Renaissance painting, and the Lorenzetti were nearly onto it almost a century earlier. The problem is that both brothers are killed during the Black Death of 1348 and their innovations go nowhere.
Consider this altarpiece by Pietro Lorenzetti. The Gothic arches of the frame are worked into the illusion of a 3d space with the walls and pillar lining up with the real frame. Everything "inside" is organized as it it is within a real room:
Pietro Lorenzetti, The Birth of the Virgin Mary, 1342, tempera on wood, Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Siena
It's Simone Martini - Duccio's other leading student - that has the immediate impact. He understands the spatial innovations of the Lorenzetti to some extent, but he's much less interested in realism. Here is a fresco from the Lower Church at Assisi that was painted by the next generation of artists in the 1320s.
Simone Martini, The Mediating Saint, 1322-1326, fresco, Lower Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi
This is a scene from the life of St. Martin of Tours that shows the saint settling a dispute. Martini is able to put together a ribbed vaulted setting for the figures that makes sense spatially. It isn't as deep or ambitious as the Lorenzetti example because Martini wasn't interested in realism in the same way.
Simone Martini takes the linear graceful Byzantine aspects of Duccio's art and develops into Gothic refinement them the way the Lorenzetti developed the realism and depth. His Annunciation altarpiece is his best-known work, and the one where his elegance and grace is most on display. Compare this to the Pietro Lorenzetti and the difference is easy to see.
Realism, but with elegance - these are the new Italian ideas that go to the Frenchmen. Simone Martini had left Siena for the new papal court in Avignon. Click for a link discussing the move to Avignon and the development of Renaissance architecture. It was here that the refined elegance of his art was exposed to Gothic artists from Northern Europe. Avignon was a major point of contact, but the aristocratic culture of the late Middle Ages spread the results across the European courts.
Remember, the courtly aristocrats had already developed their own international-leaning culture distinct from their common "countrymen". It was this culture that took to the new Gothic painting that combined grace, elegance and realism from Italy and the North. This would be the International Gothic - the last stage of Gothic painting and the fusion of Christian themes, Italian realism, and aristocratic aesthetics.
Boucicaut Master, The Marshal Prays before Saint Catherine, 1410-1415, from the Hours of the Marshal of Boucicaut, f.36v:, parchment, Jacquemart André Museum
Courtly elegance, Gothic style, and Italian realism. That's the International Gothic.
The Renaissance comes next...
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